Back again!
It’s been a while since my last blog post but as we are back in hospital again, we are back again in various ways.
Fo, AJ and I all had Covid about three weeks ago and, as we feared, it has hit AJ hard, or the after-effects of it are hitting her hard. Initially she seemed to get through it relatively easily and we hoped that she was getting it like anyone of her age with triple vaccination would, i.e. relatively mildly. But this variant seems to have a bit of an after-burner that gets into your chest and lungs – I have had a nasty hacking cough for a couple of weeks – Ava-Jane also had this cough but then it started to turn into a high temperature, fever, diarrhoea so it was looking quite serious. Ava-Jane being Ava-Jane doesn’t tend to do these things by halves and is really quite poorly. We got her into hospital and they were pretty concerned so have been running tests and pumping her with antibiotics and oxygen. I have just arrived to take over from Fo and after a pretty stressful night, AJ seems to have stabilised a bit and is out cold and snoring.
Apparently there’s a post Covid thing called Paedriatric Inflammatory Multisystem Syndrome, which might be what she has, that affects all kinds of things. I am not sure I like the sound of “multisystem”… Or it’s a chest infection. So that’s what we are hoping for – that it’s just a nasty chest infection but with her track record, it’s always best to expect the worst with AJ. I have said this before but she does consistently get the worst of any given option – when we got the diagnosis that it was either a spleen problem or leukaemia, it was leukaemia and when we were told that there can be a further complication arising from her initial heart operation, it arose… twice!
Hanging out in hospital does not get any easier as the years go by, it must be said. I am back home, sitting outside on a balmy evening. My brother, who I haven’t seen in 3 years… you know… pandemic, has just arrived from Australia. Both of us, he after a long-haul flight and me after a stint in hospital needed a meal of proper food and fresh air. Rib-eye steaks for me and Otto, lamb chops from the lambs we slaughtered this week for Toby, washed down by a very fine Rioja.
After a couple of nights in hospital you always need to decompress a bit and things can always be worse. AJ and I had a visit from a couple of friends – Deigh (mum) and Tom (son) who had been in hospital for 40 days and D doesn’t get to swap out and get fresh air and Rioja.
Our kids are getting older and we are getting older and caring for them gets increasingly complicated.
When AJ was small and she had a small wheelchair, basically nothing more than a large pushchair, navigating hospitals was that much easier – you could manage in any old corner. But these days all hospital stay options come with one complication or another. Take this most recent visit as an example.
To begin with, she was in the High Dependency Unit, which is a tiny little room right behind the nurse’s station that has an en-suite accessible bathroom.
So that means:
⁃ great: we are right behind the nurse’s station, so if things go dodgy, there are lots of nurses around (nurses are great)
⁃ great: we have an en-suite accessible bathroom, so we can use the manoeuvrable hoist to put AJ on the toilet and I can a shower undisturbed
⁃ not so great: the room is so tiny and little that we can’t actually manoeuvre the manoeuvrable hoist into the accessible bathroom, so there isn’t anywhere you can feasibly hoist her, so she has to pee in her nappy, although I can a shower undisturbed.
⁃ not so great: she is in the HDU because she really is not very well, well, you know, “High Dependency” doesn’t sound like you are doing very well.
Then yesterday the nurses asked me if I minded if we moved because they needed our room “for a child who was really unwell”, I was, of course, delighted as this meant that AJ was not “really unwell” and we were moved to a much larger room where we can manoeuvre the hoist much more freely but it doesn’t have an en-suite accessible bathroom, so there isn’t anywhere you can feasibly hoist her, so she has to pee in her nappy.
What we really don’t want is to be sent down to the zipped pods. Since the pandemic, wards have been partitioned off, not by the flimsy curtains of old, rather now you are placed into a hermetically sealed nylon pod. We had a few days in one of these pods during our last visit to hospital; they are not designed to house a whole load of medical equipment, a couple of human adults, a bed containing a funny girl and a wheelchair. So, we don’t want AJ to be so well that she is sent to one of the zip-up nylon pods – we’ll take our chances at home at that point.
Johnson… oh Johnson. That’s the problem about not posting for a while in a blog that occasionally documents quite how awful out Prime Minister is. If one week is a long time in politics, three months is a lifetime and so much has happened since I last put pen to paper, or finger to screen. It’s impossible to know where to start – I mean I have been saying he is utterly unfit to hold the position he holds but I am now joined by 40% of his own MPs and don’t forget these are the Conservative MPs that are left after he expelled a whole load before the last election, these are the MPs who were only allowed to stand at the last election after having signed a document pledging their allegiance to this charlatan and his promise to “get Brexit done.” Brexit isn’t done, of course, he is picking fights, not only with the Europeans but also with that fool who signed that Brexit deal, i.e. his own past self.
We can’t cover all his various mishaps, but let’s look at one particular thing, this policy of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Just to recap for our overseas readers and those who have better things to do with their time than to engage in a culture war and follow this shit. (Transparency alert: this will be an entirely biased recap but factual nonetheless).
The government decided to export asylum seekers to Rwanda to have their asylum petitions processed. They claim that this will deter the people smugglers from their dastardly trade by treating their victims in an even more dastardly fashion and thereby messing with the whole profit and loss side of things to make it not worth anyone’s while.
You really could not make up a more Tory solution to a tale of global misery. And, in order to make it blatantly clear how awful the whole process is, they are going to send you to a place that sounds truly awful – Rwanda.
And what’s the one thing that anyone knows about Rwanda, an otherwise unremarkable and very small central African country. It’s that they experienced one of the very worst genocides in recorded history. That Rwanda has really had an extraordinary recovery from that dreadful time is irrelevant, if you want to make out you are being really mean, Rwanda fits the bill. One other country they tried the same stunt with was Albania, like Rwanda Albania is known for its own Black Legend of having been more Stalinist than Stalinist Russia. I think that have even considered sending refugees to the remote island where they banished Napoleon. It’s performative meanness, think of it as the diametric opposite of that thing caring people are accused of – virtue signalling, which makes this, I don’t know… nastiness signalling.
I hate to come over the bleeding heart liberal here but I do think it is worth remembering that there are actual human beings in the middle of this performative nonsense. The flight that was halted, that already only had 8 passengers/victims, was halted because one of these passengers, an Iraqi, had been tortured. What have we become that we are the sort of country that will export a real human person who had been tortured just to prove a point?
The kinds of people that we are proposing to send to Rwanda are, as the Bishop’s letter mentions, see below, the kinds of people who can perfectly legitimately claim asylum here. This will include people who worked with “our” forces while we were in places like Afghanistan and Iraq – the Taliban are hunting for the collaborators that we didn’t get out, in part because one Boris Johnson prioritised extracting pets over human beings [cite source]. It will include Syrian families who have heroically resisted a much longer and just as ferocious a reign of terror as Putin has brought to Ukraine. It will include a gay man fleeing any one of a number of countries across the world that persecutes homosexuals and being sent back to a country with draconian homophobic laws. Meaning that you could escape execution in Uganda for being gay, made it to the UK only only to be shipped back to neighbouring Rwanda to die under their equally homophobic laws.
The ruling to stop the flight came under the European Convention on Human Rights if you want a quick, amusing recap on this, watch: https://youtu.be/ptfmAY6M6aA
One of the main things us Remainers have always worried about is that a lot of people who voted Leave didn’t know what they were voting for, partly of course, because the Leave campaign lied about what leaving the EU would mean. But during the Rwanda fiasco, we have seen a very clear example of this. Lots of people seem to be shocked that the EHCR still holds sway over how our government can behave, I mean it has Euro in its title, so how come we haven’t left it? Well, much like Eurovision or Euro Disney, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the EU. It predates the EU, in fact it predates the EEC and was set up, largely instigated by Britain, shortly after the Second World War, a conflict so ghastly that we thought that we should agree on common standards of human rights that are legally binding. So if you thought that by voting Leave, it meant that the British government could do what the hell it wanted, well I am afraid (by which I mean, “I am delighted”) that you were mistaken.
Something else that is limiting the government from doing what the hell it wants, is that Britain is also a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I think it also a post-WWII thing and this allows for people to claim asylum under certain circumstances, torture and the like.
It seems extraordinary that people seem to think that these are bad things. What have we become as a country where we seem to delight in not only breaking various international laws and treaties in order to treat people despicably but beyond the legalities, haven’t we lost our moral compass somewhere along the line?
People have got hot under the collar because Prince Charles and various Bishops and Archbishops have dared to voice an opinion on this subject. The bishops even wrote a strongly worded letter to the times.
That we are the only country in the world to have clerics in the legislature is quite bonkers but given that they are the Lords Spiritual and sit, as members of the House of Lords, in Parliament, it seemed fairly legit that they can voice a political opinion. But above and beyond that, surely they are permitted to voice a moral opinion. I mean, I am not Christian but, isn’t that kind of what they do? Moralising and sermonising seems very on-brand to me.
Anyway, here is their letter:
Bishops’ letter to The Times on the Rwanda asylum policy | The Church of England
The Government avoided going through Parliament and put this policy through as a memorandum of understanding, they presumably did this because they wanted to do it in a hurry (to distract for some scandal or another – I mean Johnson has a big enough majority, he could have done it properly) which is why it can be questioned by lawyers and judges. If it had been a law, that would have been more difficult.
The policy fails on so many fronts:
⁃ it won’t reduce people trafficking, it will increase it. It is perfectly legal to seek asylum, but the more barriers you put in the way of doing this through legitimate channels, the more people will be forced into trying illegitimate channels.
⁃ It is madly expensive… surely that should be of concern even for the most hard-hearted of Tories. I am not sure if anyone has noticed but the UK economy is struggling a bit, spending £500,000 on flights that don’t turn take off doesn’t sound very wise, even to an economic illiterate such as myself.
⁃ And the worst of it, is that neither Priti Patel nor Boris Johnson will have much cared that the flight did not take off or if no flight ever takes off. The policy will have achieved its intentions if they can pick a fight with lefty lawyers and better still European judges and if they can distract from scandal after scandal and their complete lack of any constructive policy that might help with the cost of living crisis we are living through.
Oh, just one other thing, and please note, I haven’t mentioned parties, but bringing back Imperial weights and measures?!?! Are you fucking joking?
I was going to stop there about the PM but there’s a strange thing going on. In early print editions of the Times, an article appeared that claimed that Johnson had tried to wangle a high-paid job for his then girlfriend, now wife. This story has now been pulled from the digital editions, with people reckoning he has imposed a super injunction to try to silence the press.
Some people seem to think that it doesn’t matter that he is a lying law-breaker. It does matter – he breaks his own laws, he breaks human rights laws, he breaks international law.
He lies to his wives, to his bosses, to the Queen, to all of us. He lies in parliament, in his newspaper articles, in his manifesto.
All of this debases us as a country and you’d imagine that people who profess to love this country would care more about what he is doing to it.
Ah well, enough of that, I got home for a couple of nights and have just had a fantastic Baxter lunch with my sister, brother from Oz, and all their kids, bar one who is on his way. Otto and Molly popped into hospital to see Ava-Jane and she seems to be on much better form and off the oxygen.
Happy Father’s Day to all you dads out – I am certainly living the dream today! Though I have to say I got a bacon sandwich for breakfast from Otto and he was going to get me a personalised Cameo video from Nigel Farage but it was ninety quid.
Misliterature 
Spot on as usual! Sorry to hear about AJ, but happy to hear she’s (hopefully) on the rise again and fingers crossed homed again soon.