pumpkinstrokemarrow

The variety of approaches to cleanliness and tidiness continues to intrigue. At a personal level, the choice of things to be tidy or clean about seems to be completely random. Some of us obsess about organising the pencils in our desk drawer, some of us obsess about the water in the soap holder in the bath. At a community level, there seems to be a national biais, in that English people seem to be fairly dirty. Aldous Huxley thought that Indians were too, but that was back in the 30's of the last century. Not sure if he was right though: another line of memory is that people in hot countries are a lot hotter about personal hygeine that we Brits from our cold climate where it matters much less.

So coming home by train yesterday, impressed once again by the huge amount of litter generated by the free newspapers - of which there seem to be four or five in the evening. Plus all the additional litter generated by there being litter there in the first place. My theory being that one is much more likely to dump one's half empty drink bottle onto a discarded free newspaper than onto a clean carriage floor. So not only are the purveyors of free newspapers helping to dumb down our taste in newspapers, they are also generating a huge amount of mess. I wonder if they contribute to the cleaning costs? I think the world would be a better place if they did not exist - although not easy to see how one can wind the clock back without making repressive laws about not being able to give away newspapers in or within 100 metres of a railway station.

And then there is the ongoing hospital scandal. The one about how dirty our hospitals are. It is, of course, quite hard to know to what extent this scandal has been fabricated by the DT or for grubby political purposes, but on the face of it our hospitals are a lot dirtier than those of our friends across the channel. One reason might be that (I think according to some article some time ago in the Economist) the French spend a lot more on health care than we do and that some of this filters through into the cleaning systems. One argument is that we employ contract cleaners who employ non-English speaking illegal immigrants to do the cleaning which is no longer managed by the eagle eyes of the right-thinking Florence Nightingale types who used be in charge of our wards. But I imagine that the French are just as much in the thrall of the outsourcing culture as we are and also that they have just as many diversities in the cleaning trade as we do. So do we send the bossy looking middle aged ladies who seem to be in charge of hospitals these days (former nurses who have made it up the expanding management ladder?) on expensive beanos to find out why the French are better at this than we are? Or is it just that the DT makes a point of featuring the bosses of hospitals which get into a mess if they happen to be bossy looking middle aged ladies? If I spent an hour on Google would I feel any closer to the answers to any of this? If I spent a week on Google, what would the Guardian pay me to print my in-depth research article?

I see that we continue to edge towards treating ourselves with the same consideration as we treat our pets. That is to say, someone being helped by 'Dignity in Dying' has succeeded in getting a judicial review of the witholding by the CPS of its internal guidelines on prosecution of people involved in assisted suicides. By such arcane procedures we inch forward.

Now while this is, for me, a very good cause, I fret about the wisdom of making governments divulge all kinds of internal memoranda of this sort. While one would not want them to be making up the law as they go along, without telling us or anyone else, nor does one want to destroy their flexibility to respond to particular circumstances in a particular, not to say, sensitive way. I believe that making people publish all the internal memoranda heads towards giving them the status of law and making it very hard for their users to use any flexibility. The point of our system of indirect democracy is that we trust those we put in power to exercise that power on our behalf without our needing to meddle in every nook and cranny.

A trust that the other scandal about the expenses of national and European MPs continues to erode. How can they be so blind as to see that their behaviour is slowly destroying the trust which gives meaning to their functions. Perhaps it is just that they are as greedy as the rest of us; content to grab a quick buck where they can and to hell with the future. For some reason I am pleased that the European MPs seem to be worse than our national MPs. Perhaps I am pleased - not sure why - to have another reason to knock the Belgian gravy train? A weaker version of the feeling that England should be run by the English and that Europeans (including the Scots) can butt out?