NEW YEAR AND POST CELEBRATION BLUES

As a result of encouragement from my one fan, my random thoughts recommence.  It's been a long time so, faithful reader, thanks for your patience.

2012 was supposed to have been a good year.  I suppose it was for royalists and sports fans. Never having been an ardent sports fan, UK's medal haul didn't really impress me.  I suppose, at the back of my mind, there is a feeling that, in this age of austerity, the Olympic money could have been better spent elsewhere.  I understand that the average cost of each medal won was £4,549,990, wow.  The total medal bill was £264,143,753, double wow. All that cash spent on fit, healthy people to pursue their hobbies to higher levels (with the possibilities of massive earning potential) when a housebound old lady who can't get to the toilet on her own has visits by carers 4 times a day, a maximum of, say, 2 hours.  The carers are probably on, or close to the minimum wage.  The mathematics of all this are, to my mind, badly skewed.

Then there was the Jubilee.  First of all, I've never been a full throttle monarchist and the only reason I'm not a full throttle republican is that it would be too complex and expensive to change, but am I the only one to think that the recent junketing was a bit over the top?  Perhaps all the talk of bankrupt Britain left me a little unready for the heady excesses of the celebrations.  Or perhaps I am right to be really, really hacked off over the massive expenditure of our money.

Then, only this week, a Lib Dem MP (you know the sort; probably the guy who blocks the middle lane of the motorway at a steady 63.5 mph) say that the only way we can fund the care of the "elderly" by chopping the Winter Fuel Allowance. Isn't caring for everybody the job of Government?  If wealthy pensioners can afford to go without the allowance then how about millionaire MP's volunteer their services without pay.  We'd have a bit more money to spare for deserving cases.  Perhaps we could reinstate the 6,000 nurses missing from the NHS since Cameron stepped over the threshold of No. 10.