DutchEnery

From time to time I watch some good reporting type programs on YouTube. Showing some sights in the world, China, Korea, Japan and a host of other countries. Showing the infrastructure. Well, my heart sinks looking at some of the things shown. Comparing that with what is around here in the UK. They build roads, new, railways electrified, everything runs on time, hardly standing in trains, plenty of seating capacity. The trains are supersonic or so it seems. 400 kms an hour and some don’t even have wheels! Like the Maglev. Over in the UK Wales is lucky to get second-hand old diesel buses! The roads are in such a state your car will need a new suspension within one year of buying it. Where does all our money go to? Am I missing something? Let’s have a comparison exercise, we have the NHS, a great thing to have. It costs billions though, other countries only have a rudimentary system that mostly you have to pay for. In Holland they have a three-tier insurance system. The bottom tier ac

Just to mention our prime minister (the best one we've had for some time!) is now also suffering the effects of the Covid virus. Let's hope, nay pray, that he will pull through! It would be terrible to have to go through all that electioneering, backbiting, arguments, telling lies and more, all over again. So Boris, get better soon, I'll keep my fingers crossed. At least you are in the right place, the hospital in London in which you are now is one of the best. And as an aside we have to be thankful for the people of the NHS, talk about putting your life on the line? It should be applauded. But humanity has a short memory span, when this is all over who will remember the unstinting service of the nurses and doctors? Well, for one I will! It is through them I am still here and not in a shallow grave or wafting about like a spirit. Look at what they do now - going to work knowing how their day may end. Soooooooo, here is a big hand from me. PS I used an image from dreamst

Reading the few daily newspapers I can still get in the local garage it strikes me as odd as to how many reports are doom-laden. Death and destruction all around? Footballers crashing their multi-thousand pound cars after partying with half the nation or so it seems. The papers have a field day! However, I noted one article which struck me as very forward and shall we say, thought provoking? Trevor Kavanagh in the Sun newspaper stated some home truths! Now the Sun is not a newspaper where one can usually read good national comment, in the main it is a bit of a glorious gossip paper. But sometimes it hits the mark, and so it is today. Trevor rightly asks – where is this Covid-19 hysteria getting us? People don’t talk about how many die of the ordinary flu? As he said during the 2018 Beast of the East winter some 50,000 died! So far and of course it is sad, just over 1,200 have succumbed to the Coronavirus in this country. Yet did we shut down the country in 2018? How many will now

At this time in our collective lives on the planet, stressful though it is, we need to put our thinking caps on. First of all the situation with diseases is relatively simple, they have always plagued humanity. And not just us either. If you think about how life has evolved, how it appears today you will see very quickly that literally everything depends on something or somebody else. To put it bluntly, as food. Obviously that also means defence mechanisms have evolved as well. If a body is attacked then if the defences are strong the attacking entity will get rebuffed or killed. If the defence is lacking or weak, the victim may succumb and may die. That is the simple rule of life. I suppose it is scant satisfaction knowing that you are food but thinking like that at least will make you see the reality a bit clearer. So, what about this corona virus then – is it unusual? No, it is not. Somewhere along the line of life we have picked up an organism that usually lives on or from s

This is the time when you will be able to see how people can react to external stimuli. There is a disease around, yes in Wales too, that unto now has not been known As a result humans have no resistance. If you are in a good condition you might be lucky to roll over it but if you have underlying medical conditions or are older your resistance will be diminished. Those are the facts. But what I thought last week might happen after all the TV reports about dead and dying has now happened, panic buying of strange things we normally do not buy in quantity, toilet rolls! Followed on by almost anything that can last more than a few weeks. There are people bragging on social media who have hamstered supplies that probably will rot away before they can eat it all. Next we can see people in quantity this Sunday with very nice weather at the seaside walking the promenade in their thousands! Which of them did not understand the words, rampant disease, danger of death? Just look at what it does

The papers are full of ‘Community spirit’, ‘Look after the elderly and so on’. Great, it is good to read but what is the reality in the UK? The supermarkets had set a time for elderly and the more vulnerable to shop for an hour, for instance Tesco has set aside Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9-10 am. I applaud the reasoning behind this. Full marks to the supermarket managers. Unfortunately they did forget one thing – the attitude of a good percentage of our wonderful British public. Don’t hoard, don’t panic buy, apparently are switches in our collective brains to do just that – panic buy and hoard as much as you can get away with. Special hours for the vulnerable? To hell with that, as you can see on some of the photos in the papers. Queues start forming way before opening times, snaking around corners for hundreds of yards. People are pathetic to the extreme. What worries me is that this will happen again and again, viruses will continue to crop up. It is the way nature respon

If you did not know how powerful media is then just look at the coronavirus situation. It is the news channels and the type of reporting that has resulted in an absolute storm on the shopfloors of the supermarkets. Despite the suggestions that over-70’s stay at home, Tesco in my part of South Wales was literally brimming with ‘oldies’. They were ‘fighting’ over toilet rolls, paracetamol and anything that could be kept for longer than a week. Rather interesting to see, the social scientists will have a field day to figure all that behaviour out, the how’s and the why’s. But the BBC has to share the blame, yes I know it is news but this way reporting in every sentence how many people had caught the virus and following that up with how many had died. Next we will have names and family history included. And then we have the Twitterati – you know them in common life as idiots or ultra liberal lefties– spouting all sorts of fancy reasons what this virus is about. I feel sorry for the Ruski