Update

Sorry for the recent silence. I'm progressing well but have been feeling so tired. I'm trying to do a bit more and to mobilise a little further and it's really hard work, hence my inability to blog. I'll try hard to get back to it as soon as I can.

We were only following orders

The cretins at Barnsley Primary Care Trust have managed to comprehensively upset the parents of a 11-year-old boy by writing to them to tell them their son is fat and could be in danger of contracting type 2 diabetes or cancer. The boy in question, Tom Halton, is a fit and active young man whose weight and height placed his Body Mass Index slightly outside the Department of Health's guidelines.

As most schoolboys know, muscle weighs much more than fat so an active young man of above average height could probably look slightly overweight on paper. In a sane world, a properly trained nurse or doctor would take one look at the boy and realise that weighing 7st 10lb at 5'1" meant he was not in danger of keeling over at any minute. However, the semi-trained chimps and their computers at Barnsley PCT decided to spew out an automatic letter and cause offence by insulting Tom's parents by suggesting they were overfeeding him. The letter upset Tom so much that he stopped eating. Genius... we now have one young boy erroneously tagged overweight and no doubt anorexic within the next few months. What halfwits!

No doubt Tom was weighed at school and his data passed on to the PCT by an imbecile with a silly job title. This then triggered the Nanny State into full offensive action and ended up causing all the trouble. As the new Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley, said the other day, government must stop lecturing people. Of course, NuLabour Super Nanny has been poking its nose into areas where it wasn't welcome for far too long but let's hope this stupidity is going to be increasingly rare now that we have a change of government. I hope that the fatheads whose job it is to send out these letters are reassigned to more useful duties very shortly... picking up litter or cleaning toilets would probably be more within their capabilities.

Barnsley PCT was approached for a comment and said it was only following national policy. Hmm... that old chestnut! They have since issued a grovelling apology. Not good enough. Send them to the gulag!

Latest x-ray

I wonder how much I'm worth for scrap. Still, this ought to help keep me in one piece.

Bone-headed bureaucracy

It's not just here in the UK where bureaucrats appear to have undergone a frontal lobotomy. Virtually every nation under the sun seems to have been taken over by complete morons. Take the example of a South African man, mistakenly listed as dead by authorities, who has spent four years fighting to prove he is alive so he can get a passport, register a car and change his wife's marital status from "widowed".

Claude Pretorius has been working to correct the bureaucratic error since 2006, when he discovered, while applying for a passport, that the Department of Home Affairs had listed him as dead. "They told me that I could not apply for a passport as I am deceased," the Johannesburg man told the The Star newspaper.

Mr Pretorius said he got a sworn affidavit from police affirming that he is alive and was issued a new identity number, enabling him to buy a car. But the problem resurfaced last year when he tried to register the car with the traffic department. "I found out that my status has again been changed to deceased," he said.

Three weeks ago, Mr Pretorius was given a ticket for failing to license the vehicle. "How is it possible for me to purchase cars, but the minute I need to obtain any form of licensing, I am declared deceased?" he complained. His wife has been unable to give legal help - since she is officially listed as his widow.

Amazing, isn't it? The poor man is declared dead and can't do any of the things he should be able to do but as soon as he infringes one of their petty rules they are able to issue a dead man with a ticket and bring him back to life as if he were Lazarus. I expect they're still taxing him too. 

It never ceases to amaze me how efficient the punishment arm of government works but the bit of the state which is supposed to help people is a shambles. 

Sweet Jesus!

NHS Chiefs in North Wales have decided to ban sugar from vending machines that dispense hot drinks in hospitals. The miserable, shrivelled and humourless idiots that run healthcare in that benighted part of Britain think sugar has no nutritional value so they, egged on by the ridiculous Welsh Assembly, have decided that all their subjects must be prevented from exercising the personal choice and freedom to sweeten tea or coffee.

Experts claim that sugar is a 'risk to health', although probably nothing like as risky as a stay in an NHS hospital. Welsh Assembly documents circulated to NHS hospitals in Wales also recommend that water, juice, seeds and dried fruit be placed in vending machines as healthy alternative snacks. That's bound to cut the takings of vending machines dramatically which in turn can only lead to an increase in parking charges in order to recoup lost income. Of course, sugar in tea has little nutritional value but that's not why most people use it... they put it in their tea because they like the taste. Incidentally, the advice also recommends that Cheddar cheese sandwiches are also banned as they contain too much fat. That's vegetarians stuffed, then.

As a nation we really do have to begin asking ourselves how these brain-dead gastropods and incompetent fuckwits manage to worm their way into highly paid and responsible positions within the public sector. How can these fools possibly imagine that their pathetic attempts to micro-manage people's lives is going to go down well with anyone but themselves and their pathetically timid political masters? It's time we stopped being in thrall to these idiots. The Soviet Union had ways of dealing with people like this: gulags. Isn't it time we introduced the concept here? Or, at the very least, village stocks.