Quacks, prayers and naff art? No thanks!

An invitation on the government website (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/dhss/rewardingrecogni.xml)
to find out more about hospital volunteering is making me quite ill. Really!
I have nothing particular against hospital volunteers. I’ve never met anyone they’ve helped myself - the ones who sit near the Nobles Hospital entrance to act as hospital guides, for example, never know where anything or anyone is.
But I’m sure they do good for somebody.
The thing is, if you skim through the press release straight to the end (where they list the speakers and advertise the inevitable church service) this is nothing but a list of the wrongheaded organisations and ideas that make any hospital visit a nightmare.
For instance, have you SEEN the bland junk they pass off as public art in hospitals?
Even Manx artists, most of whom couldn’t flog their tat in an Oxfam closedown sale, see the Healing Arts Programme as a conspiracy against taste and decency. Anyway, as Quentin Crisp always said when asked what had he got against art, ‘What have you got against bare walls?’
And don’t get me started on the cancer industry, as typified by the Macmillan goons.
After the DHSS included a chapel in the new hospital without bothering to ask anyone if it was needed (or what form a religious room should take if it could be shown it was), and as the Christians wouldn’t share their ghetto with anyone else, there was a campaign for a neutral place where anyone could go for a spot of peace and quiet instead. A store room near the entrance then had a sign reading ‘quiet room’ sellotaped to the door for about a month. That was the full extent of the information campaign, or attempts to meet needs of those of other religions, such as the predominantly Muslim medical staff.
Then a ‘management consultant’ coincidentally involved with twonks who ‘treat’ cancer with plastic smiles and aromatherapy intervened. The store room immediately had shedloads of public cash wasted turning it into a Macmillan Care ‘Information centre’ (read ‘begging bowl with carpets').
Yup. Volunteer to make me a nice cuppa when I’m twiddling my thumbs on a hospital ward in the near future and I’ll thank you for your kindness. But if I only have one life (which I do) I’ll be quite happy if I can lead it totally free of bad art, religion and interference from clueless pseudo-professional parasites such as cancer charities.

No bus pass, no chance

I've just been reading through the Council of Ministers monthly meeting minutes of recent months and found a particularly hilarious gem.
Now I’ve always held that individuals decades past their sell-by date are kept on government ‘advisory bodies’ in favour of the clued up: that way civil servants can rubberstamp predecided policies, however dumb.
But can you believe that the government’s representative on one international body was actually, at the time of appointment a few years ago, known to all in that specialist community to have been diagnosed with Altzheimers? Admittedly, this is a ‘specialist community’ so parochial as to be positively incestuous, but staggeringly the person involved has only been replaced in recent months, by which time the illness was in the final and most tragic stage.
I first moved beyond just suspecting such phenomena twenty years ago, when the chair of a very august and powerful Manx body told me his greatest fear was that one day they’d fail to get a quorum on an important issue because most government appointees had popped their clogs before it was put to the vote. He also told me it was not unknown to take silence as a vote for the status quo on prickly issues, even if the silence was only interrupted by snores.
Then again, a few years back I was also at the AGM of a local charity which is the sole government consultant on ‘their’ special interest. The fossil chairing talked about recruiting ‘new blood’ to the committee. As a forty-something with an extremely informed interest in the client group my ears pricked up, until it became clear that they considered anyone under 65 as too immature, and would only act on introductions from clergy. I’m not ageist, and all for retired people putting their life experience to good use, but the client group here was severely deprived people in their twenties!
The lesson seems clear. Before volunteering for any of those government liason committees you see in statutory local newspaper advertisements, get a note from your doctor. If he can’t confirm you’re close to dementia, and if you can’t back that up with another note from a clergyman confirming your illiteracy and total disengagement from anything resembling modern life, you will waste a perfectly good postage stamp.

Ken Knowles, ODC

I was sorry to learn that my fellow local Amnesty campaigner, Ken Knowles, had died recently.
Ken was one of the last of the island’s most endangered species, the Ordinary Decent Christian. A retired schoolmaster from Ireland, he was one of the little band around a local liberal clergyman who started the Manx Amnesty group, and who is himself no longer around. They saw absolutely no contradiction between vigorous human rights campaigning and their faith, so it might be inevitable that they found themselves in the minority in their churches while able to work comfortably with non-Christians who are simply unwelcome elsewhere in what passes for charitable activity on the island.
As Ken’s health deteriorated he offered to host the Amnesty meetings at his house to stay in touch, and when a ‘proper’ venue opened we saw less of him. I didn’t find out he’d also lost his sight until he rang out of the blue after I’d had an item in the paper supporting another good friend - Pat Kneen, the Manx assisted suicide campaigner. Ken was irate about the local church attitude to the issue, in particular the way in which four leading churchmen took it upon themselves to put the church ‘view’ to government without ever seeking it from their congregations, and had even dictated a letter to the papers by phone.
He was amongst those who left their regular churches at the time, distressed by the lack of discussion and kneejerk attitudes. I’m not sure he ever found another church community, which was heartbreaking for him but a greater loss to local churches. They lost a thoughtful, sincere man who simply could not be silent about human misery.
But the discourtesy of his fellow-believers did nothing to diminish Ken’s faith, and I also remember him disagreeing sharply in print with my fellow Freethinker Andrew Dixon’s quip about ‘bronze age belief systems’.
A lesson for us all locally here. This isn’t the UK, and you can’t cut yourself or others off because you disagree with their views on one topic. The churches do it all the time, then wonder why they’re dying or why the voluntary sector whose policies they insist on dictating is a sick mess. But then some of my Freethinker mates won’t work with ‘people of faith’ either, unable to see that some people just cannot frame their view of humanity except through a prism of faith.
Folk like Ken and I just plodded on, looking for a middle way on the things that matter most to us, agreeing to disagree on other topics and moving on.
I could take a dim view of the island, having witnessed the public treatment of either of my late friends, Ken Knowles and Pat Kneen. I think I’d rather take something positive from having known two remarkable men in a small community in a few years. That either of them were able to speak up, and that neither of them were broken by the bigotry or apathy that surrounded them.
I think I’ll take an example from that.

Death on Wheels

On Friday I had another startling insight into the bats-in-the-belfry mentality of local voluntary groups.
The insight came from an unlikely source.
I sit on an ethics committee charged with formulating hospital policy in the event of pandemic flu. It’s unusual in my experience of government advisory committees, in that it’s formed by dedicated professionals who seek only to do what is best for the public. There are no chancers from pseudo-charities seeking grants, no stooges of other government committees to force pre-arranged agendas, and no civil servants pushing us towards the rubber-stamping of government apathy.
We discuss scenarios put to us by health professionals as a means to set ethical policies. These deal with the most appalling moral decisions they may have to take in an emergency.
It is frightening stuff, and some of it gives me nightmares for days afterwards. But I am impressed by the dispassionate yet considerate way in which my colleagues listen carefully, comment frankly, and do their level best to reach conclusions which could help doctors, nurses and administrators take life or death decisions.
Then sometimes there’s a lighter moment. For example a colleague who told us about a curious request at a sub-committee to co-ordinate health and voluntary workers in emergencies.
For some peculiar reason, and against all prior evidence, the government (like other parties to the plans who are yet to look at actual evidence) is obsessed with the idea that the public will riot in emergencies and mob rule will prevail. Perhaps this might explain why one of the local twin set and pearls brigade wanted to know, in all seriousness, if meals on wheels drivers could be armed in emergencies.
I have this surreal vision of a meals on wheels van careering through, say, Onchan, at top speed. Wing-Commander Cholmondely-Barking, DFC and bar, sits white-knuckled at the wheel, cornering on two wheels, while in a roof gun-turret Mrs Constantine Effingham-Smyth, OBE, blazes away with both barrels at a horde of zombie chavs.
Only in the Isle of Man could someone at a government consultation group hold such whacked out views about the majority population. More worrying, only in the Isle of Man could they be taken seriously by politicians.