Sunny, with the odd cloud

Sunny and cold- perfect winter weather! Poor Martin was travelling from Inverness this morning where the fog stopped play, and he had to rush to Aberdeen with a couple of passengers that he kindly offered a lift to, and he's now on the way even further south to play a surprise gig for someone.

I wandered out to the antique market, a small but perfectly formed patchwork of things you want and things you wouldn't let over your doorstep in a trillion years (used to be a million, before inflation); I was lucky and spotted a 1940s dress, exactly what I'd been looking for, not too stinky and not too torn. Upstairs, a large blue and gold pot marked 'Leeches' tempted my dark side, while a knackered piano stool tempted my practical side, but I decided to go away and think about it, and I was glad I did because I phoned the vets to arrange to pick up Old Lady Cat's ashes (I miss her) and to ask how much my bill was.
AAArgh!!!!!
Every penny I've earned from the University of the West since October, that's how much.
AAArgh!!!!!
What can I say? Thank God we have a National Health Service for humans, that's what, and don't forget the Tories were all set to dismantle it and sell it off before the change of government, and that's exactly what they will do when they get in, because of course they are all rich enough to pay to jump the queue, aren't they?
That was the one major thing that politicised me, back then, because we have a system that is the envy of the world even though we criticise it, and without it we'll become a feudal society again.
It's sometimes inefficient partly because of it's own success- all those premature babies that it saves, and all those people with previously-incurable cancers- well that type of care costs an absolute fortune and we have come to want and expect it- and it sometimes happens at the expense of more basic things.
I used to work at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, just when scanners were invented by EMI which meant that brain investigations, previously done by pumping coloured gas into the skull, could be done painlessly and quickly. We used to marvel at the horribleness of it. Now, almost every hospital has a scanner.
It's not a perfect system but it has quite possibly saved my life- and quite definitely saved me years of pain and discomfort. I still take a box of chocolates to the Accident and Emergency Department each Christmas, because I'm not sure anybody thinks to thank those at the front line, and I'll never forget how kind they were to me once upon a time.