pumpkinstrokemarrow

Now have quite a decent show of daffodils in one sector of the new bed. The new bed being four sectored and L-shaped. Sector 1, off picture to the left is the snowdrops which have come up if not having been too splendid. Sector 2 is next, with its right hand portion being in the left of the picture. Daffodils up but some way off flower. The two or three bags of bulbs were randomised, but that must have been within sector. I can't see how the weather in sector 2 would be that different from that in sector 3 round the corner, the position of which can been found by looking at the turn in the border bar at the bottom of the picture and where the flowers are well out. Sector 4, off picture to the right is the winter aconites which like the snowdrops have come up even if they have not been too splendid. Both will probably do better next year, in part because the grass will be cut at the end of the summer and be shorter at this point in the cycle.

Larger animals seemed to have stopped poking around, although the place where they sometimes jump can be seen in front of the blue slide, but the presence of a good bit of well rotted garden (rather than kitchen) compost in the beds has certainly encouraged the worms. Much bigger and grander worm casts than we are getting in the lawn proper, relatively rock hard clay.Some of this can be seen under the border bar.

Border picket fence now backed with chicken wire to discourage transit of young dog from the land of the slide to the land of the daffodil.

Having done the daffodils to death, the next topic of breakfast pondering was the way in which process has taken over the world. BH noticed a bit in the DT the other week on this very subject and I had been well in the grip of IT process (and consultants selling IT process) in at least two of my various postings in the civil service.

From there I jumped to the way in which the same sort of people like to impose nice tidy hierarchies on organisations. For example, when I first joined the Treasury it had rather an odd structure. By the time that I had left it had been tidied up with 7 (or so) directorates with each directorate owning a number of teams and most teams owning a number of branches. The people in charge of teams were called team leaders instead of assistant secretaries and pretty much everybody sat open plan. Even the Treasury Knights. The only untidiness was a sort of layer between directorate and team, not fully recognised in the paperwork, with chunks of directorates headed up by vice-directors or some such. From which I now draw the lesson that while the old structure might of been untidy, it did perhaps reflect what the Treasury did. To revert to IT speak, the old structure was driven by the function, rather than letting the function be driven by the structure. This last being anathema in the IT world. And while the IT process people had a point, that the solution should be driven by what the user says and does, I never thought they allowed enough rope for IT to suggest new things to say and do, new things made possible by the IT. I suppose this was the consequence of users having been bitten once too often by IT salesmen selling the moon and the stars, this in the bad old days when big IT projects were always overrunning, collapsing or otherwise going pear shaped.

I then jump to ambulances where, in this area, we are served by something called the 'South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust' which serves Kent, Surrey and Sussex. Guessing, we used to be served by a much smaller operation, possibly organised at more or less a district level. So every district had an ambulance service, complete with ambulance station, chief officers and all the overheads of a free standing operation. Hundreds and hundreds of them, all cosy and local, but perhaps not terribly efficient. Perhaps organised into regions for the purposes of chief officer conferences. So maybe what we have bought from the shake up into trusts, as well as a lot of disturbance, is a shake down into units of organisation which really work. Units which look from  http://www.nhs.uk/servicedirectories/Pages/AmbulanceTrustListing.aspx  to be roughly old-speak regions in size but with subtle variations to allow for the terrain on the ground. Which, partly because there is no nationally imposed hierarchy, can strike the right balance between the various conflicting demands on such a service. It may be that similar arguments play in other parts of the Health Service.

So I might be allowing some point in the proposed NHS legislation yet - even if I never allow any point in the package as a whole.