Americans and the citizens of other countries probably don’t know that in the UK a habit has started in which the nation come out of their homes at 8 pm on Thursday and clap for the National Health Service (NHS) because they have courageously saved the lives of thousands of people suffering from the coronacrius infection. In doing so they have sometimes risked their own lives and many have succumbed to the disease. The front line staff deserve all the praise they can get. They have been heroic.
But the NHS as a whole is badly flawed and does not deserve praise. And certainly the managers and some doctors don’t deserve clapping every Thursday at 8 pm. That’s a personal view and I hold it strongly. I have seen how the NHS works and it does not deliver consistently high quality, far from it. There have been many botches and some terrible cases of mass murder or at least gross neglect. That’s one reason why I don’t clap them. The other reason is because the clapping scares my cat. He tries to flee the noise but has no idea where to go because it is all around him. It is not pretty. I recorded it. The video above is low quality deliberately to keep it lightweight. You can get the gist of the problem and hear the sounds of pots being banged and hands being clapped.
What you see is a cat confinement fence. He is outside it. He got there by using a tunnel under it created by a badger! Anyway he got out of the fence some time ago by biting through it 6 foot above the ground. That’s my cat for you. One in one thousand cats escape this fence the manufacturers claim. He is the one.
