Random chatter

It's been awhile since my last random blog about anything and everything. Haven't mentioned the football for quite some time mainly because of the recent humiliation suffered by Liverpool at the hands of Arsenal - (twice). However this weekend sees a big opportunity for Liverpool to restore some pride when they play Chelsea. They have the chance to actually beat them for the first time since Benitez took over in the Premiership and with it, go only 5 points behind them in the league. With the recent announcement that the Champions and Runners-up stand to receive £50million, coming second is a realistic target for Liverpool - my support is on the up.

Watched the first 4 episodes of the new season of 24 and needless to say the quality of the show continues to astound. Obviously some of the logic goes out of the window and what people manage to achieve in each hour is quite astonishing. It seems that there is no such thing as traffic in Los Angeles, given that it takes a prisoner 9minutes to escape, get changed and arrive at the other end of LA to meet with his terrorist buddies. Yet again the baddies are Arab Muslims, perhaps they've settled on a method of having bad Muslims in every alternate season. What the terrorists manage to achieve though, is highly impressive - not wishing to give anything away you'll have to see it for yourself - and it starts on Sky One/HD this Sunday.

The racism row on Celebrity Big Brother shows no sign of calming down. Yesterday the housemates discussed the issue of racism with Shetty initially claiming she was a victim of racism but later retracting that statement and Goody trying to claim that she's not a racist. With both Shetty and Goody up for eviction this evening, people are calling it a vote for or against racism, high stakes indeed. I don't think it's quite as drastic as that but although there has been a lot of apparent sympathy for Shetty, I still think the majority will vote to save Goody because they are a lot like her. I will be extremely surprised if Shetty stays in the house. I still can't believe that I'm actually typing about Big Brother, a show I've refused to watch for the past 6 years. What has the world come to?

Being a Friday, means I normally discuss medical matters, even though I haven't done so for quite some time. It was quite revealing to hear the Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt's thoughts this morning on the way to work. Apparently she made a mistake when negotiating the GP contract in 2004. She would've introduced a salary cap if she knew how much GPs would earn with the contract.

How dumb can you get? She's basically saying she didn't realise that GPs would do as well as they have. By making the contract more target-based, she's now surprised that GPs have actually met those targets and gone beyond. So she's not happy that the quality of care that GPs have provided has improved. I am the first to admit that GPs no longer have to work as hard as they did with the removal of out-of-hours care on weekends and nights, but why complain when she negotiated the contract in the first place. What did she expect? That GPs wouldn't want to meet targets to earn more money?

What this all means I don't know. It will be difficult to re-negotiate the contract to make GPs earn less, I don't think she can ask GPs to take a pay-cut. However, what she can and probably will do is increase the targets that need to be met for the same amount of pay and also increase the hours GPs work with a return of weekend and night cover. Ironic really, since the main reason I wanted to become a GP was the quality of life, the lack of weekend and night time work. I await the developments with much pessimism. Hopefully the existing GPs will put up a good defense as they should, my trainer for one has claimed he will retire if he has to do weekend work again.

I watched the Trial of Tony Blair last night on Channel 4. What an excellent docu-drama. The actor playing Blair (I forget his name) was absolutely superb, at times he really looked like Blair himself. I hope beyond hope that one day Blair is held to account for his actions. Every single death of British troops and Iraqi civilians is his responsibility and I hope he has as much difficulty sleeping at night as what was portrayed in the drama last night. Yes Saddam Hussein was an evil bastard, but there weren't suicide bombs going off almost every day. Having visited Iraq in 2002, I never got the impression that people were fearing for their lives the moment they stepped outside as I imagine the situation is now.

Muharrum starts this weekend, an especially important time for all Shias across the globe. No matter how religious we are, during Muharrum every Shia unites to mourn the martyrdom of our 3rd Holy Imam, Imam Hussain (a.s.) and his family. I hope to type a blog on the subject next week.

Take care all,
Thoughts just flow, when do they have to make sense?