pumpkinstrokemarrow

But three more amusing snippets yesterday. First, it seems that the people who made my posh pocket knife, the one that nearly got confiscated by the Eurostar police on account of its blade being half a centimetre longer than the regulations allowed, have had their name pinched by some enterprising gent importing cheap lookalikes from China. So if you want a real Laguiole knife, go to the hunting and fishing outfitter in Pall Mall that I got mine from. You will be amazed at how long the thing keeps its edge if you look after it. Plus I had not realised that the Laguiole is a place in the south of France, north east of Toulouse. The knives have not actually been made there for years but China is taking the mick.

Second, I see that foxes are becoming something of a menace in Homerton and that an animal marksman was seen entering domestic premises in the company of a policeman. Slightly puzzled by what a marksman might do. I thought that part of the point of firearms regulations was that you did not want people banging off in crowded suburbia as you could never be sure what a stray (rifle) bullet might bump into. But perhaps a police supervised marksman would be OK; never known to miss. The good news is that maybe fewer people will feed the wretched things. I'm told in TB that ball bearings and a catapult are quite good for seeing them off, but not quite got around to it yet. http://catapultsuk.com/ looks to be the right sort of place. Much more sophisticated than the things I used to use when little.

Third, I read that back in the days when we were inventing foundation hospitals, hospital management teams were so busy doing meta-management - that is to say outward facing management of people in the Department of Health and HM Treasury - that they had no time left to do any management of their hospitals. With various dubious practises creeping onto the shop floor as a result. Let's hope that the new team don't initiate another giant round of reorganisation - with, of course, the best possible intentions and supported by the best possible (incidentally most expensive) advice from management consultants - and so initiate yet another round of meta-management.

I wonder if hospitals use the same sort of fat procedural manuals to direct their work as IT departments? Zillions of boxes to tick and headings to create action under. It seems more than probable. But maybe the DT exaggerates. In my time with what is now the Ministry of Justice it was true that a lot more time was spent managing the construction of IT systems than was spent on constructing IT systems. But that is the name of their game these days. I was not aware of that much time being spent fighting off the witch-doctors - or perhaps the witch-finder-generals from HQ.

But I should put in a word of defence for fat procedural manuals. If everybody uses the same ones, one not only gets a reasonable job done, but it is also very easy to move staff about or to take new staff on. They just plug into the same old manual wherever they happen to be put and from wherever they happen to have come. Also makes it very easy to hire consultants from the same gang that wrote the manuals in the first place. The catch is that they make what might have been interesting work terribly tedious.