Pelagius is almost famous

Last week our local rag ran a follow-up article on my recycling of street waste project. Only a quarter page, with a photo so small you can barely make out my face, in a journal with a 75,000 readership is scarcely Pulitzer prize stuff, but it is more column inches.

With the help of a friend I am beginning to uncover the reasons for the Council's failure to recycle waste retrieved by the street cleaners. Turns out it's a complicated job to change their working practices. The unions would have to be involved; job descriptions would have to be re-drawn, plus there is the inertia of what they refer to as the "culture" of the workers involved. But as one friend pointed out, the Council is very keen to have the public change its ways, recently increasing the green sack collections from fortnightly to weekly, for instance, but they are clearly much less anxious to change their own ways. This, as they say, ain't over.

BLS UPDATE.

BLS stands for Basic Life Support and the local health authority insists all members of the general practices, doctors included, must attend a 90 minute session annually to refresh their resuscitation skills. Now my Alzheimer's not yet having kicked in big time, I can still recall the details of the course last January fairly well. But the hook is that every year the organisers of the courses tinker with the protocols ever so slightly so we "need" to attend to apprise ourselves of these updates. This can be seen from the latest media campaign fronted by Vinny Jones, which discourages people from deploying mouth-to-mouth breathing,standard received wisdom until this year, presumably on the grounds that surveys have shown that most people would find such a practice so distasteful they'd really rather the victim died than expose themselves to the horror of applying their lips to those of an unknown person.

It's bollocks really. Whether on the street or in hospital, success rates of resuscitation hover around 10%, which I'm sure is an overestimate. When people have a cardiac arrest they're kind of, very ill, usually beyond the help of anything other than divine intervention to bring them through. When it's your time, it's your time...