ANARCHIST SOCIAL WORKERS

There is a line in the glorious Tintin pastiche cum anarchist polemic Breaking Free about being forced to start up `Revolutionary Meals on Wheels`, and I have been thinking of that line quite a lot over the past few days.

I am basically an old hippy who wanted to run a club for those folk interested in mystery animals, breed tropical fish, write books and tend his garden (or more honestly, watch Graham tend his garden). When I moved here four years ago to look after my father it was with the firm intention of living as reclusive a life as possible and never leaving the village unless I was dragged kicking and screaming to do something that I couldn't avoid.

OK, I exaggerate but basically I intended to run the CFZ and let the rest of the world run itself. I have enough healthy distaste for the mechanisms of modern society to be able to label myself an anarchist, but I am not the sort of anarchist who marches, throws things or stops the city. My anarchism is on a personal and family level.

However, I do have dependents, animal and human, both within my family and from outside, (and I seem to have a life skill in acquiring them), and in recent weeks, and most notably in recent days, I have been dragged into the real world of doctors, nurses, social workers, age and disability support teams and stuff - a world which I am vaguely familiar with from my days working as a nurse for the mentally handicapped (or whatever they are called these days) a quarter of a century ago.

I hated working with the so-called `caring professions` then, and hate it even more now. I am completely amazed at quite how inefficient and stupid some of these people are!

I thought that the CFZ were inefficient, because we are staffed by unpaid volunteers, more than a few who have physical or mental health problems, but compared with the DSS, the National Health Service, and Social Services - especially those branches with whom I have had to deal in the past week, we deserve the Queen's Award for sodding Industry.

I have been faced with:

• Care needs assessment for a chronic case that took 48 hours to arrive
• Someone who fell out of a hospital bed injuring themselves because no-one had bothered to get a `side thingy` for their bed, despite repeated requests, although a gaggle of staff were always to be seen cackling and watching Neighbours
• An old lady of 87 threatened with eviction from her new flat because no-one had helped her fill in her rent forms (she is both deaf and blind)
• The same old lady who (until I put the boot in) would have had to wait for three months hardly being able to hear anything, because of the waiting list to get a new hearing aid at the audiology department

And so much more that I really cannot be bothered to repeat it. You get the idea.

And I always remember the shocking standard of treatment that my fcather received during his final illness, both in and out of hospital. Just one incident comes to mind - we had been trying for weeks to get a visiting district nurse to come and sort out a quite important problem, to no avail. However, I was out one afternoon when two nurses turned up, and Graham and Mark assumed they were the ones we had been waiting for. They weren't. They woke the old man up purely to get him to fill in a questionnaire for a survey called `Options for Change` - and then left again.

This is the sort of nonsense we have to deal with every day.

The New Labour `style over content` society has reached ridiculous levels of stupidity: vast amounts of money are spent achieving absolutely nothing. I am not attacking the people on the shop floor. Nurses, doctors and social workers etc. are as good and bad as they ever have been. I have met some wonderful individuals in the last week; individuals who move mountains and cut any administrative corners necessary to do the best for their clients. But I have also met some complete idiots who do nothing and care less, and I have come to realise (OK I always did realise) that we now live in a culture where the dullards, idiots and incompetents flourish, and the freethinkers and bright sparks who actually care, and who have the skills and enthusiasm to actually make a difference are in danger of being swamped beneath a tide of mediocrity and pointless paperwork.

It's a bit like contemporary cryptozoology really.

We are rapidly approaching a stage where the services provided by the powers that be for the aged and vulnerable are completely inadequate, and the onus of care is thrown back upon the families, and irritating folk like me who insist on pushing their noses into the social workers' business and causing trouble. Which is why I have a lunchtime meeting with one set of DSS bods, and a housing association, and I am out of bed and working hours earlier than usual, just t0 get the blog done before Graham and I ride out on our steed (ok the Daihatsu) to do battle with the powers that be in aid of an 87-year-old damsel in distress and another one a few years younger.

So at the moment the CFZ is not just the world's largest and (we like to think) best cryptozoological organisation but it is also the Bideford branch of Anarchist Social Services. Weird, huh?

Read `Breaking Free`Online I think you will approve.

LIZ CLANCY: Out

LIZZY: Thank you very much to those who sent kind messages about my being ill. I'm thankfully out of the hospital now - bad spellers beware!!!!

JON: Bloody hell. I hope she doesn't look at the posts of the past few days. My spelling quite probably left something to be desired, and Lizzy is scary when she gets the bit between her teeth. But seriously, welcome back honey...

(at least she is not in the office at the moment so I don't have to be subjected to Take That)

OLL LEWIS: Yesterday’s News Today

http://cryptozoologynews.blogspot.com/

More news from the CFZ’s daily news blog, uploaded by Gavin Wilson and formed into an easily digestible bloglett and with a bad pun by me.

Beavers are answer to UK flooding

'Skunk whisperer' in peanut butter rescue

Can you rename William, the F-reg horse?

Invading giant snakes threaten U.S. wilderness areas

Halloween fake spiders 'could scare arachnophobic man to death'

New flying reptile fossils found

Marabou Stork on the loose in West Sussex

I expect twitchers will be out ‘stork’-ing the bird in the hopes of catching a glimpse.

DALE DRINNON: Giant Tortoise trivia

Following on from Richard Muirhead's recent postings on giant tortoises

Trivia bit on giant tortoises: inhabitants of several Pacific island including Hawaii have a traditional knowledge of Galapagos tortoises. There are stories on record when they were shown photos of the tortoises they would say "Oh yes, we know about those: we used to have some of those a long time ago"

This has been added to books about folklore amid head-shaking and disbelief. But there is an obvious solution: in the days of the big sailing ships when voyages were hard and provisions uncertain, ships would stop by the Galapagos islands and load up on some live tortoises to be slaughtered for meat along the way (they can survive a long time on minimal fodder). So at some point, the natives on the various islands could have seen the tortoises taken on as provisions.
And this means specifically land tortoises and NOT sea turtles: tradition specifies "Legs like tree-trunks".

Reports of Elephant seals around Hawaii used to be similarly dismissed, but it seems that some of the California ones can stray out that far from satellite tracker reports from radiocarrying seals.

STRANGE TALE FROM KITHRA

Over on her blog, Kithra tells a remarkable story:

When I was 13 or 14 (in 1962/1963), I was at boarding school in Newbury, Berkshire, just 2 miles from Greenham Common Air Base. One day a friend decided to run away. The night she did this I was concerned for her safety and, after 'lights-out' I watched from my dormitory window. It would have been sometime after about 9.00 p.m., and I watched for a long time. I saw her go down the long drive, (at least the length of two hockey pitches), and disappear out of sight.

For some reason I stayed watching the main road that ran past the end of the school grounds. Suddenly, on the road, looking to my left, I saw a very tall figure that can only be described as a 'Michelin Man'. It must have been tall due to the distance involved, and the fact that I had such a clear view. I watched as it walked up the slope of the road to the crest of a hill, and out of sight.

Read On...

RICHARD MUIRHEAD: Reasons to be cheerful

Richard Muirhead is an old friend of the CFZ. I have been friends with him for 40 years now, since we were kids together in Hong Kong. He is undoubtedly one of the two best researchers I have ever met; he and Nigel Wright both have what Charlie Fort would have no doubt called a wild talent; a talent for going into a library, unearthing a stack of old newspapers, and coming back with some hitherto overlooked gem of arcane knowledge. Twice a week he wanders into the Macclesfield Public Library and comes out with enough material for a blog post..

Dear folks

I have been speaking this evening, Tuesday October 13^th, to Julie Horner, editor of Butterfly Conservation`s Cheshire and Peak District Branch News and also Alan Blears, author of an article on page 8 of the September 2009 Newsletter titled, `Reasons to be Cheerful.` They have given me permission to reproduce it here: (it has particular relevance to the north-west of England.)

Global warming,deforestation,collapsing fish stocks,seabirds in trouble. Doom and gloom. It is oh so easy to be depressed and pessimistic. But wait! It is not all doom and gloom. Stop and think how it used to be back in the `good old days`.

In the 1950`s Manchester, where I used to live was a smoke blackened dirty place bordered to the North and East by equally black towns on the banks of stinking open-sewer rivers, pouring more pollution into the atmosphere from hundreds of smoking factory chimneys.

Today Manchester is a clean,vibrant modern city where Peregrine Falcons nest and the surrounding towns are smart,attractive places set in beautiful countryside. The chimneys are long gone and the rivers are now clear and stocked with fish.

Here in Stockport the variety of butterflies seems to have bucked the national trend. Thirty years ago the Comma,Holly Blue,Small Skipper and Speckled Wood were rarely if ever seen. Now they are common and have been joined recently by the Gatekeeper. The Wall Brown and Small Tortoiseshell may have declined,but those other living jewels Red Admiral, Peacock and Painted Lady are much more common.

In my garden I have numerous songbirds including Goldfinches and occasionally I see a Buzzard circling overhead,an unlikely sighting even ten years ago. If sometimes a ring of feathers on the lawn bears witness to some unfortunate victim of a Sparrowhawk then this is also good news. The raptors` presence today reflects not only on their recovery from near extinction in Britain but also thriving wild bird population,without which they could not survive.

In autumn 2007,just ten minutes walk from home, I was able to watch Brown Trout, Sea Trout and Salmon.Yes Salmon!- jumping a small weir on the sparkling River Goyt. These fish had swum up the Mersey, once one of the most polluted waterways in Europe and virtually dead, and then into the Goyt.

Above the surface these once foul waters are now home to Dippers,Grey Wagtails,Kingfishers,Herons,Goosanders and Cormorants, a situation inconceivable just thirty years ago.

So, it really isn`t all doom and gloom and although so much more needs to be done to protect our precious planet,let`s just for once allow ourselves to be cheerful and optimistic instead of depressed and pessimistic. The work of organisations such as Butterfly Conservation and the R.S.P.B. is definitely not in vain.

Richard Muirhead

THE AES SHOW IS COMING UP

It is that time of the year again folks - the AES show at Kempton Park. For financial and family reasons we won't be there this year, but I hope that we shall be back next year. However, here are the details from today's Entomological Livestock Group newsletter:

AES Annual Exhibition and Trade Fair: 2009 - 17th October 2009 (11:00 - 16:30) The AES first
held an annual exhibition in 1939, since then the exhibition has grown in to the largest entomological fair in the UK. The exhibition is held at Kempton Park Racecourse during the autumn each year. The Annual Exhibition and Trade Fair hosts a mixture of societies' stands and traders selling entomological equipment, livestock, mounted specimens, books and cabinets. The
exhibition is the place to buy entomological ephemera, meet fellow enthusiasts and have a
great day out. The exhibition is open to members of the public and not just members of the AES.
Should you wish to join the AES then you can do so on the day but you don't have to be a member to attend. For more details see the AES website - Admission is £3 for adults and £1 for kids. Bug club members bearing an exhibit, though, will get in free, as will one accompanying adult.