The personal and the political

1. My aunt, the excellent sensible one, is a doctor in a family planning clinic in Oxford. She loves the work, because she likes helping people in a practical way, but with seniority has come increasing administrative duties which have made her life difficult. Family planning is always under threat in budget terms -- family planning and mental health are the two areas where there have been big cutbacks recently. This is utterly ridiculous. My aunt says something like two out of every five pregnancies in this country is aborted, and given that some people will just go with it and have the baby anyway something in the region of half of British pregnancies must be unwanted. And this seems terrible to me. Anyway, amid the constant round of threats of closure, reductions in salary, sudden moves to new premises confusing the people of Oxford, my aunt and other managers received a directive that they must all have a blackberry. So each of them was given a blackberry and made to go on a course to learn how to use it. When all my aunt wants is to be allowed to do an extra shift of actual clinical work, and be paid properly and given administrative support to do it.

2. My uncle, the difficult sexist racist one, has recently returned from a tour of duty in Basra. He's a Lieuftenant Colonel in the Territorial Army, because he's a surgeon. Now he's not an easy man to deal with, and he was really very unkind to me when I was a child, but I have to give him credit for doing what he sees as his duty, viz. going out and patching people up in foreign wars. I suspect that he is pro-war, though I haven't asked, but whatever your position on the war you can't deny that it's better for there to be surgeons there than not, and he gives up his NHS work, for which they replace his salary, and his private work, which is the major part of his income anyway and for which he gets no recompense, to go out and try to make better some truly terrible injuries. This is his third time out there, and now he's 65 I hope they might let him off going again. My mum met someone who had been out there with him the other day, and she said he had a reputation as the person who didn't turn away from the terrible things but always tried even on the cases which many people found hard to face. On previous occasions most of his work has been with civilians, which has had its own stresses, but this time he was actually on the front line, with constant if intermittent shelling, and no small number of near misses. He said one man there was killed by a single piece of shrapnel no larger than a five pence piece, which went straight to his heart. He was telling me (he must have been badly shaken, to be capable of chatting on the phone rather than his usual monosyllables) that they would read the British news and it would say "1 dead in Basra" or something like that, but they'd know it was really 5 dead in Basra, or more, he'd have seen the bodies, but only one of those was British -- the rest would be Pakistani or native people working for and with the British, and they didn't get recorded.