Recently I'd been thinking that I don't dream much these days, or don't remember them. That was until last night when I wallowed in reverie happily beating up Little-Englander-in-chief Nigel Farage, the UK's answer to Donald Trump, and a self-confessed admirer of Hitler. By the end of the dream I was trying to strangle him and didn't even wake up sweating, conscience clear.
So I chuckled cynically when I remembered the days I spent in Lincoln Hospital, and particularly a guy called Sam, an auxiliary nurse from Ghana, whose big smiling face appeared in the doorway several mornings a week. Then there was Klara from Kenya, Benny from Seville and Dorota from Bulgaria. The cleaners were Spanish, Portuguese, Lithuanian, etc, none of them seemed to originate from the UK.
The NHS clearly operates a very multi-cultural system where immigrants are gratefully received. Life saving, in fact, which makes me laugh vis-a-vis the majority decision of the UK people, led by Farage and his like, to leave the European Union for blatantly racist reasons. If all invited 'immigrants' are forced to leave, then the NHS, already on its knees due to consistent Tory government under-funding, will collapse. And for sure the mass majority of those Little Englanders voting for this policy will be those who expect free health care at the click of their demented fingers whenever they next have a brain tumor or shoot themselves in the foot.
The NHS is loved by the masses - free health care for all - but despised by the Conservative party and assorted hangers on - FREE!!! health care for all, they shriek as they would love to destroy this 'free' aspect and make everyone pay for health care. The masses point out that their taxes on income are for such public services and are rightly proud of such a ground-breaking system.
Yet, despite the underfunding, this first stay for me in an NHS hospital was impressive, as the nurses were great, the doctors to the point and the food excellent. I also liked the knock-out drug they gave me in the evenings (you have to ask for it as 'pain relief') which had me snoozing in five minutes flat.
The only downside were the junior (described to me as 'baby'), all English, doctors who suddenly appeared on the ward en masse having recently graduated from medical school. Needing a blood sample from an artery (tricky to get to) it took four of them, one after the other, an hour of jabbing and gouging inside my right wrist. In the end all of them failed to extract anything other than sheer pain and a senior nurse was called in to find the elusive blood. But, hey, practice makes perfect ... or maybe not.
My strangling of Farage in the dream was probably down to his campaign's shameless lie before the referendum vote promising the 350 million pounds the UK was supposedly (and misleadingly) spending each week on membership of the EU. Instead, they crowed, this money would be put into NHS funding. Now, post-referendum, he and his Nazi cohorts have confessed that nothing of the sort will happen but his efforts to chuck out immigrants will continue.
If only dreams could become reality, huh?
So I chuckled cynically when I remembered the days I spent in Lincoln Hospital, and particularly a guy called Sam, an auxiliary nurse from Ghana, whose big smiling face appeared in the doorway several mornings a week. Then there was Klara from Kenya, Benny from Seville and Dorota from Bulgaria. The cleaners were Spanish, Portuguese, Lithuanian, etc, none of them seemed to originate from the UK.
The NHS clearly operates a very multi-cultural system where immigrants are gratefully received. Life saving, in fact, which makes me laugh vis-a-vis the majority decision of the UK people, led by Farage and his like, to leave the European Union for blatantly racist reasons. If all invited 'immigrants' are forced to leave, then the NHS, already on its knees due to consistent Tory government under-funding, will collapse. And for sure the mass majority of those Little Englanders voting for this policy will be those who expect free health care at the click of their demented fingers whenever they next have a brain tumor or shoot themselves in the foot.
The NHS is loved by the masses - free health care for all - but despised by the Conservative party and assorted hangers on - FREE!!! health care for all, they shriek as they would love to destroy this 'free' aspect and make everyone pay for health care. The masses point out that their taxes on income are for such public services and are rightly proud of such a ground-breaking system.
Yet, despite the underfunding, this first stay for me in an NHS hospital was impressive, as the nurses were great, the doctors to the point and the food excellent. I also liked the knock-out drug they gave me in the evenings (you have to ask for it as 'pain relief') which had me snoozing in five minutes flat.
The only downside were the junior (described to me as 'baby'), all English, doctors who suddenly appeared on the ward en masse having recently graduated from medical school. Needing a blood sample from an artery (tricky to get to) it took four of them, one after the other, an hour of jabbing and gouging inside my right wrist. In the end all of them failed to extract anything other than sheer pain and a senior nurse was called in to find the elusive blood. But, hey, practice makes perfect ... or maybe not.
My strangling of Farage in the dream was probably down to his campaign's shameless lie before the referendum vote promising the 350 million pounds the UK was supposedly (and misleadingly) spending each week on membership of the EU. Instead, they crowed, this money would be put into NHS funding. Now, post-referendum, he and his Nazi cohorts have confessed that nothing of the sort will happen but his efforts to chuck out immigrants will continue.
If only dreams could become reality, huh?