How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [64]
It gets worse. They say that if the NHS were a country it would be the eighty-first biggest polluter in the world, between Estonia and Bahrain in the league tables, and that as a result people will be discouraged from going to hospital in a car.
Right, you pig-ignorant tossers. I’m at home. I think my boy has meningitis. Do you think I’m going to take him there on the bus to help protect the plankton? Or do you think I’m going to wait for an ambulance that you’ve converted to run on melted-down Tories? Well I’m not. And if you turn all the car parks into allotments, I shall simply drive my Range Rover through the plate-glass windows and park in the foyer.
They also want hospitals to get their power from wind turbines, which will be a great comfort on quiet, still days to those who rely for their next breath on a life-support machine. And they say that patients should drink less bottled water, presumably so that they have no option but to drink from the MRSA-infested sinks.
You think this is all nonsense? Well, you’re right, but sadly they haven’t even got started yet. They want equipment to be reused. What equipment? Needles? Nappies? Rubber gloves? And get this. They also say hospital staff should be encouraged to work from home. I’m sorry, but what good is a nurse when you need some more painkillers and she’s at her place, feet up and watching Countdown for all you know? The problem here is that the government announced recently it wished to cut the output of carbon dioxide in Britain by 80 per cent by 2050. That cannot be done, but of course it has to be seen to be trying, which is why the NHS now has a Sustainable Development Unit – the department behind all these idiotic ideas.
Its quite frankly deluded boss, Dr David Pencheon, says that in a low-carbon future, healthcare will not look anything like it does today. You’re damn right, sunshine. The hospitals will be full to overflowing with people who are dead.
Sunday 1 February 2009
I dare you to visit Johannesburg, the city for softies
Every city needs a snappy one-word handle to pull in the tourists and the investors. So, when you think of Paris, you think of love; when you think of New York, you think of shopping; and when you think of London – despite the best efforts of New Labour to steer you in the direction of Darcus Howe – you think of beefeaters and Mrs Queen. Rome has its architecture. Sydney has its bridge. Venice has its sewage, and Johannesburg has its crime. Yup, Jo’burg – the subject of this morning’s missive – is where you go if you want to be carjacked, shot, stabbed, killed and eaten.
You could tell your mother you were going on a package holiday to Kabul, with a stopover in Haiti and Detroit, and she wouldn’t bat an eyelid. But tell her you’re going to Jo’burg and she’ll be absolutely convinced that you’ll come home with no wallet, no watch and no head. Jo’burg has a fearsome global reputation for being utterly terrifying, a lawless Wild West frontier town paralysed by corruption and disease. But I’ve spent quite a bit of time there over the past three years and I can reveal that it’s all nonsense.
If crime is so bad then how come, the other day, the front-page lead in the city’s main newspaper concerned the theft of a computer from one of the local schools? I’m not joking. The paper even ran a massive picture of the desk where the computer used to sit. It was the least interesting picture I’ve ever seen in a newspaper. But then it would be, because this was one of the least interesting crimes.
‘Pah,’ said the armed guard who’d been charged with escorting me each day from my hotel to the Coca-Cola dome, where I was performing a stage version of Top Gear.
Quite why he was armed I have absolutely no idea, because all we passed was garden centres and shops selling tropical fish tanks.