Jester, You Are Joking! And More NHS Failings

My Father in Law is ill again.  I know it's inevitable at the age of 93 that he will not be like a Spring chicken but it still saddens me when he is suffering.  He rang the doctor himself on Monday morning but, although a home visit was booked, no-one showed up.  On Tuesday, OH rang the surgery on his behalf.  Well, he rang & was cut off, rang and was cut off, rang and was cut off.  Each time he went through push this button, push that button, then a recorded message kicked in " we are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment, please try later" CLICK and was gone....It took three quarters of an hour to finally speak to someone and to request a visit to his Dad.  Just after lunch the GP rang here for further details, now although we appreciate him calling us why did he not read the records which show FiL has bowel cancer?  The GP made his visit and was very kind  but 2 days later the medication has still not arrived due to a mix up which means that the pharmacy never got the prescription to make up.  Dear lord, when did the NHS get to this point.  We don't live close enough to keep popping in to FiL's so feel very helpless and sad for him.....

On a lighter note, I found some quirky yarn called Jester which has pompoms incorporated within the yarn.  Yay! I thought, an easy way to make a pretty child's scarf. I bought just one skein to try and boy am I glad it was was a solitary skein :/  I found it almost impossible to unravel. Starting off by unravelling enough yarn to knit up to the first pompom was difficult and I couldn't work out how to roll it into a ball because all the pompoms meant it got tangled at every turn. Blast!  I knitted up to one pompom and found that the weight of it pulled the stitches out of shape around it....

It looked lovely in the skein....

Then I really came unstuck, I mean, really .... aarrgghh

After half an hour of twisting and turning I exploded, metaphorically speaking, cut off the pompoms leaving a long tail of yarn attached and painstakingly re-rolled the bits of yarn into small balls which I can use for other projects.  Never again....NEVER!

PS the marks you can see on the furniture are shadows from the sunny day and not coffee stains!

Thanks everso for popping in and have a wonderful day wherever you are x






 attached