Alex K

Rich_T... in thankfulness for a prose-poem like that one, I'll go straight for you, mate.

As one who proudly sports the "large wadge badge", I can confirm that many single men live in East Dulwich. We are all gay.

He drew a circle that shut me out -- heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in. Thank you, peterstorm1985, for reminding me that I can do better.

Chick Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > How do you know they were little criminals? > Innocent until proven guilty etc. Police want to > do a lot more to them? Like what, give them a good > kicking? > > How old were these little ciminals? A good kicking is a start. Give them a PROPER grudge against society, that would. And make the rest of us feel better.

Adam999 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Alex K wrote > > > The failure to act swiftly, and forcefully, to END > > those events... Isn't that the police's fault? Point for debate. > > Adam999 replied > It's not a point for debate. The police are doing > their best to control what is in effect mob rule > across London with limited numbers and resources. > They are brave people, risking their lives on the > streets trying to deal with these rioters and so > deserve our full support. Hey, Adam999. Let me parse the idea of "the police" here. The front-line officers: Yes. They are doing what you say. They deserve our full support, as you say. But "the police" are an apparatus that extends upward. Our society accords to the Crown a very strict monopoly on the use of violence, of force. (Examples exist without number of those prevented from encroaching upon this monopoly -- the teachers not allowed to lay hands on disorderly pupils, the homeowners hauled into court for injury to burglars.) This monopoly exists because it is the royal duty, in protecting the realm and the subjects, to keep the Queen's peace. This monopoly is exercised by the Queen-in-Council through the police. Over the last few days many persons have repeatedly breached the Queen's peace and the Crown has not acted through the police to ensure that that peace be kept. The Queen is thus derelict in her duty toward her realm and subjects -- an interesting point. In the days of the Riot Act, once the Crown had declared that a state of riot existed, once the Riot Act had been read and the breach of the peace was thus acknowledged, not only could force against rioters be used much more freely; in addition, insurers were relieved of their responsibility to compensate the damaged. Which is why we now have only "civil disturbances", as I understand it; no riots, because once riot exists then claims for damages fall against the Crown... The persons directing the policemen and -women on the street are also "the police", Adam999. They have not done fairly by their subordinates on the street. They have not permitted those subordinates to deploy force in a manner that would let those subordinates ensure that the Queen's peace was kept. They have forgot how to exercise the police's monopoly on force, and they thus have put the public and their subordinates at risk. Those upper-level members of "the police" evoke my disgust. I'm sorry not to have set out this train of argument in full when first I posted. Can we agree to support our uniformed policemen as they pound their beat and to deplore the nonfeasance of their desk-working superiors, right up through every level of the Home Office? I hope so.

Adam999 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > This is not the police's fault so why are you > disgusted by them? in response to my comment that I am disgusted by a police force that has forgot how to use force. Hey, Adam999. Thanks for asking. Let me divide up the "this" in your response. The throwing of bricks through windows and the setting afire of buses is not the police's fault. Agreed. The failure to act swiftly, and forcefully, to END those events... Isn't that the police's fault? Point for debate.

Absolutely correct, Clio731. Postponement of access to Waitrose is trivial compared to what this will do to house prices... Erm, sorry. Black humour, again, and likely also a mis-fire. In seriousness: I am afraid. I am appalled. I am disgusted by a police force that has forgotten how to use force. I have the front door on double-lock and the baseball bat in the hall, and I am glad not to live near the high street.

This sort of thing just pushes further and further into the future any decision by Waitrose to open on Lordship Lane.

The Dog Kennel Hill Sainsbo's was open a quarter-hour ago -- all shutters rolled down, security personnel tapping batons into their palms outside. Erm, make that two security guards and three blokes in J Sainsbury livery, one walkie-talkie amongst the five. If you had a tan from your holiday you weren't allowed in. Please discount that statement as well. However, my housemate, who described the scene there in somewhat **cough** inflammatory terms, says, and this is a TRUE, that from the window of the 68 he saw three separate muggings between Burgess Park and Camberwell Green -- a moped stolen and two bicycles stolen, knocked off whilst riding and scarpered on the stolen goods.

This thread got me back to the Rye on Thursday. Two pints of ale and a cheeseburger and an order of onion rings. ?16.80 all told. And what had been a horrible, awful, no good day started to brighten wonderfully. Whatever a Meatwagon burger does to my neurotransmitter balance (with the ale playing its important part of course), I like.

I'm proud to be at King's, to work at King's. **Note: My affiliation does NOT mean that in this on-line posting I write, or "speak", in any official way for the hospital or for the Trust.** I know that we who work there make mistakes -- but I also believe that each mistake recognised at King's is cause for sorrow and, I trust, for learning. I am confident that King's gets more right than wrong. Nothing is all good or bad. King's is excellent, in parts; and it tries, I think, to do better wherever it can.

@DulwichFox -- Volcanoes, yes, but also -- inside the last 16 years -- the stillness after 11 September...

More frequent, please; and I still regret the decision to route the bus away from East Dulwich station.

Typo for "erotic".

@Tarot: How differently we responded to those topiary dogs! I laughed, yes -- out loud, and said to myself, A bit of humour, a pun on the road's name -- brilliant! Are you reconciled to them now?

Oh, Melanie. I hope that you posted out of excitement when you wrote that you might give your Shih-Tzu away. Surely she would miss you dreadfully. Would she ever understand that your decision to separate your lives wasn't HER fault? Be staunch: Carry your head high, carry a knobkerry or a sword-cane should a dog again have at either of you, and carry on!

Of course the prescriptions for NHS pay are published. I'm NHS-paid myself. To publish these prescriptions is a Good Thing. How individuals employed by the NHS are paid is veiled. I am not sure that the veiling is a Good Thing; I believe that it may be instead a Bad Thing. Whether Peckham Rose, as a NHS Trust Governor, can accomplish various goals that she might set out when electioneering is not something on which I can comment. If one of her goals is PUBLISH THEIR SALARIES, however, I shall vote for her. To be disappointed in matters like this won't surprise me overmuch, or embitter me. I'm rabble, and I'm used to being roused to no purpose. **goes back to checking the DAILY MAIL on-line**

If PUBLISH THEIR SALARIES is a plank in your platform when you DO stand for election as a hospital / trust governor I shall surely vote for you.

"The blue block north of Abbotswood Road is the demolition layer of Constance Road Workhouse." Fascinating -- http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Camberwell/ tells one a great deal -- but... how does that fact make the patch in question soggier than elsewhere?

A road further on -- that is, on the side of Abbotswood nearer the stadium -- they're no worse than the noise off the telly with your spouse watching Match of the Day in the next room.

Combined Cadet Force, eh? A young man in cammies, (mostly) olive green and tagged "CCF", on my 176 toward Penge today, out at Northcross Road around noon. A surprise to see that garb; I congratulated him on his activity, thanked him for wearing "uniform", and wished him well. Wonder if that's where he was heading.

@srisky -- 5), yep; 4), yep, sympathy mis-placed; 3), worth a try, with conscription added if need be, although to relax entry-visa and professional-practice restrictions for medical careworkers from non-European lands would probably take up any slack; 2), agreed, and "eroding morale", oh, my, yes!; 1), the consultant top whack, brutto, that you cite is, I believe, pay before London weighting, on-call premium, and "discretionary points", and, most importantly, is for a ten-session NHS commitment. Many consultants work a twelve-session NHS commitment as well as seeing private patients. After pay for the extra two sessions, before private work is figured in NHS income alone, netto, not brutto!, thus often kisses ?100K / year; from the underside, but even so. Why am I still renting, then? Alimony, child support... Oh, well. **grin** Private-practice work and keeping one's hands clean: For me to do no private-practice work was not possible, it was explained to me when I moved here, since to refuse it would unduly burden colleagues in a thin rota. Those same colleagues were reluctant to allow fees that I earned for such work to be shared out amongst them; they imagined feeling beholden to me, and disliked the prospect. An accommodation was reached. I turn over all my private-practice fees to King's College London, the academic conjoint twin of King's College Hospital Trust, to support my division's academic work with the purchase of reagents and laboratory kit, books and journal subscriptions, and travel and lodging for visiting students from Third World venues, yadda yadda. Whether any of my consultant colleagues in other divisions does this I can't tell you. "Details of salary" are an interesting if pornographic topic. At the University of Michigan, an anecdote only but bear with me, please!, every year the student-run campus newspaper printed the salary of every one, EVERY ONE, who worked at the University of Michigan hospitals complex, several tens of thousands of people it was, from surgeon-in-chief through postroom porter. The State of Michigan paid those salaries and they were matters of public record in which the public was expected to take an interest. Why individual NHS workers' salaries and CVs are not also yearly published puzzles me. Transparency of this sort could only be salutary: Jealousies fed on imagination grow fatter than those fed on fact. In addition, market forces work best when information is freely accessible -- otherwise a cartel exploits some advantage against the interests of the public. Is the BMA a cartel, are the Royal Colleges cartels? Are senior NHS management a cartel who justify their own juicy wages more readily by supporting high pay for medics and then saying "But see what THEY'RE paid!"? More questions than answers.

"You've buttered your bun, now lie in it" -- Jiminy Cricket, in PINOCCHIO -- always amused me. Shows how old I am, I reckon. (No, I didn't see it on 1940 first release...)

Thanks srisky / moos -- I'm myself a consultant physician, at King's, and I know from the inside that all that you have set out in your posts is true. The young man wielding the suture needle on me (lovely subcuticular technique, by the way) who was still in plastic-surgery training may elect to spend his life restoring presentability to childhood burn victims. If so, good for him. He may elect to spend his life doing follicular-plug hair transplants, and if so, good for him. I'm not here to judge. Would it cost the nation less to buy every medical student a Jaguar and a starter flat at the beginning of his or her studies, and to cap medics' pay at ?40K / year thereafter, rather than to let them -- yes, including me -- gouge the public for forty years at ?120K+ / year whilst they and their partners cry the blues about at one time having had to eat baked beans from the tin? Discuss. Certainly front-loading the medical compensation package would ensure that our medics are selected solely from among those who feel the Call, the "vocation", as srisky puts it. And what about me, preaching water and drinking wine? I came to the UK from the USA ten years ago to work in a socialist medical system, gladly taking a 50% salary cut, because I believed and believe in health care free at the point of delivery. To my way of thinking, in the USA I was drinking wine, in the UK I'm drinking wine still, although -- financially speaking -- screwcap (UK) rather than A.O.C. (USA). Now, as to the psychology / motivations of those who elect A&E work, which were the matter of my post and which your comments have not addressed: I hold that trauma / acute-care medicine is medicine without commitment to the patient. (This opinion applies to anaesthesiology and to intensive-care medicine as well.) The commitment extends to the situation; the patient is handed along for follow-up to a different medical team. Those who make it their career, in medicine or in nursing, are not interested in long-term involvement with those whom they treat. Those who do it as locums, in medicine or in nursing, are well-compensated. For these reasons I suggest that the OP's sympathy toward A&E staff is misplaced. Someone working by choice in A&E beyond student or trainee obligations has, I think, buttered his / her bun, and is happy lying in it.

Provision of care to the destitute, the marginalised, is left to junior doctors; just another rung that must be climbed on the route up and out to a BUPA consultancy in leafy Surrey. Or: Don't feel too sorry for the KCH A&E personnel. If you choose that life you're in it for one of two things: Either the money (the fellow who sewed me up the last time I came off my bicycle, one Sunday morning at King's not too long ago, was moonlighting for considerable quantities of dosh; his day job was as a plastic-surgery registrar north of the river) or the adrenaline thrills of move-'em-in, patch-'em-up, move-'em-out, and no tedious outpatient-clinic aftercare / doctor - patient relationships.