Free at last, free at last……..

So, 14 days retired as of yesterday. Do I feel any different? Is it going as I expected?

Well, I still haven’t done the tasks I was putting off and off until I had “more time” (cleaning, maintenance, sorting and taking unused clothes and books to charity shops, etc. etc.) but otherwise …. no to the first and also the second.

Silly questions really. I mean, what was there to change in the first place?

True, the government no longer requires me to even pretend to earn a living – and will now pay me a basic income (once their office drones get round to pressing the right button or their computers do it for them). But I was hardly doing that anyway, was I?

In truth I started retirement the day my loved ones decided I was surplus to requirement and threw me out. In fact – being vaguely organised – I’d already started the ease into retirement 10 years ago.

For instance, I’d already decided to kick back at work and do little more than turn up and do only what I was asked. To be honest my job was simply to help ensure awful excuses for humanity with far more money than they need hang on to it, so I rarely bothered to do more than that anyway.

I was just ensuring a mortgage, rates and utility bills got paid. Once that necessity was removed there was little point in being there, so I got out as soon as I could gather enough courage to go and do…. well…. nothing…. At least for a while.

Only a mixture of arrogance and economic necessity prevented me from being state subsidised to do that. I never wanted to officially count as one of the underclass (council house, semi-invalid on sick benefit, etc.), so as I had rent and utility bills to meet on my bijou private flat I needed a job for a little longer to meet them, and care work suited me down to the ground.

It was hard(ish) physical work, with rubbish money, facilities and hours and barely literate workmates – some of whom were just there as they had no other job choices, having slept through school and wasted every life opportunity. But I have no complaints about the last two years.

Being paid a pittance to be of practical use to somebody for a change was useful, personally satisfying… and sometimes interesting. Also, a way to prove to myself that you really, really don’t need much of the rubbish you’re told you do, and that you can get by on next to nothing. In an odd way, almost like renouncing the world and becoming a monk.

Now that stage is over. I’ve adjusted to my secular monasticism and will have just about enough cash coming in to live as I want to and where I want to.

By the standards of the world, I am now a pauper. But I don’t care, because I will never again be at the beck and call of the dull or idiotic, which makes me a millionaire.

As Lou Reed put it so aptly, ‘Champagne in the morning/and my breakfast at night/I’m beginning to see the light!’

Then yesterday I was saddened to see an obituary notice for one of my favourite residents – a 99-year-old gentleman who’d survived World War Two, gone on to marry, found and run a small-town business and raise a lovely family, and lost none of his old school manners and charm as age and decrepitude overtook him. Though it’s said far too often (and usually of those who were nothing of the sort), he really was the last of his kind. A modest model of decent, responsible masculinity that simply no longer exists.

Well, does it?

It was final confirmation of the end of an era. Two weeks ago, I finally retired from a place of work that was nice enough but simply not what it was when I started.

The older, sicker residents died off – as they obviously do in a care home. But the ones who went were characters, while those coming in were… different. More demanding, selfish, whinier.

Rather than the hardy souls who’d seen wars and risen from real poverty these were the first cradle-to-grave welfare state brats and social climbers. People who’d had every little luxury served on a plate. Better medicine, education, housing and social welfare, bigger cars, fuller shops, the first foreign holidays…. you name it and they had it on tap, and usually at somebody else’s real expense rather than working for it or contributing to it. But they still whined.

I know – everyone says that’s what old folks do. But as someone who has looked after succeeding generations of oldies since my teenage years, I can say with authority that they never used to.

The wards full of WW1 vets I nursed when I first left school just got up in the morning, had a cup of builders and…. got on with it. Successive generations – mostly – had some of that spirit of self-reliance, self-respect, good manners, and community-mindedness. Prior to admission, many had to be pestered to start picking up their pensions and would die of shame before claiming other benefits.

And as for complaining in shops and restaurants –and in particular about public services (hospitals, GP surgeries….) … not done. Ever.

This incessant crinklie moaning is a phenomenon that – at my guess – started with those who reaped the first benefits of post-World War Two growth and stability and has got worse amongst those who hit late middle age in every decade since.

The current baby boomers (and, yes, I am a tail-end example) are worse than the golfing Rotarians and public sector gravy-trainers with friends on the local council who immediately preceded them.

Generation X are shaping up to be even more self-obsessed and pathetic, Millenarians make Gen X look well balanced, and as for what might follow……well, thankfully, I won’t be there when their grandkids are cursing them, so I don’t need to give a flying one.

‘But’, you are asking, ‘aren’t you doing the same? Just moaning like a typical old fart?’

No. I’m laughing at them. I don’t take such whingers seriously. I don’t demand anything should be done about it. To be honest, they’re too dumb and the phenomenon too daft to worry about.

And if people get upset because I point it out? Well, that’s even funnier, and I’ll laugh even louder and longer.

And the funniest thing? I now have all day and no distractions to stop me.

Now we are two

As of this moment I am divorced. At least I think I am.

At 9.55 this morning a judge will certify a divorce order. The proceedings were started some time ago by The Lady Previously Known As My Wife as that was her wish. I have had no involvement with those proceedings apart from signing bits of paper when requested to.

I signed away my share in the house. I signed to say I would raise no objection to a divorce application. Because what else can you do when the people you love most say that your presence in their home makes them unhappy?

Why is divorced a category on forms anyway? You’re either single or married/in a long-term relationship.

 Why not leave it at that? Whose business is it anyway, and why are you stuck for the rest of your life with the suggestion that you failed?

I do not think we failed. We succeeded in all the things a married couple are supposed to do.

 We made a home, had a child, supported each other in bad times and good and did the same to relatives.

Neither we nor the child did anything to attract police or social work visits.

We taught our child to read before she started school and encouraged her to ask questions and study hard.

We held down good jobs and asked neither state nor friends nor relatives for financial support.

We looked after our health and did not waste NHS time and resources on self-inflicted medical conditions.

Taxes and rates were paid on time.

For ten years, as my parents got more and more ill, we supported them too. My wife cleaned and shopped for them, we both ran errands, I checked on them daily, made myself available at all hours of the day to take them to hospital in emergencies (towards the end almost weekly).

Where in all that is the failure?

All around us were people who whinged about work and the government, rowed and smashed up their homes late at night, dropped litter, got drunk, drugged, neglected their kids, stole, vandalised and in all areas of their lives wasted state resources because they refused to take any responsibility.

In our workplaces, daily, we were surrounded by people involved in what is, effectively, corporate crime or theft from weaker people in poorer countries.

We were the exception. We were responsible, self-sufficient, generous to others in genuine need.

Yet we failed?

No, though maybe we just got too tired and there was no time – anywhere – in our day to check enough on each other. But that is not failure.

We did our best. But in a sick, lazy, irresponsible and stupid society we were the very rare exception, so it was not enough.

Do I feel any different after the judge has banged his gavel? What happens now?

I feel no different. I loved my wife long before a government official declared we were legally a couple. I will love her and my daughter just the same to the end of my life now that another government official has declared we are no longer legally a couple.

My values do not come from a state or a magical imaginary friend, so the opinions of random employees of either mean nothing to me.

I love, and I try to support those I love most. In my paid work and my outside life I try to be of help to others, and in all things I try not to be a burden on anybody.

I did that yesterday. I do it today. I will do it tomorrow.

Carer less

I spotted this (Carer survey launched – 3FM Isle of Man (three.fm)), which, on the face of it, offers carers a long awaited chance to tell government about the practical problems they face.

Except that if you follow the link (The Carers Survey 2022 – Cabinet Office of the Isle of Man Government – Citizen Space) you discover that it doesn’t. Because the survey is being run by Crossroads, an ‘independent’ puppet charity set up by government to divert attention from the problems caused by…. well, social services cutbacks and every inefficient government social policy which followed, to be honest.

Crossroads was set up and originally administrated by the chief executive of the island’s council for voluntary organisations – an organisation so free of government oversight that he had government e-mail and phone numbers listed in the civil service phone book, operated from a government office and drew a government salary. I know because I was in that office several times during the setting up of a local housing charity, which he also oversaw on behalf of government, which had refused to take effective measures to deal with homelessness but also refused to work with any charity set up by concerned citizens who wanted to do so unless it could choose the trustees.

In practice, that choice boiled down to ensuring that all trustees were compliant members of evangelical churches with which the government already had understandings. You can judge the high moral fibre of those trustees if you know that the housing charity’s first secretary and only paid employee (another evangelical and government stooge) was recently sentenced for sex offences involving minors.

So, if you were to respond with any view that was not in Crossroad’s favour would they pass it on? Doubt it.  Crossroads, along with the social services, being itself a major obstacle to a carer’s ability to care this makes the whole survey a little suspect, perhaps even perpetuated in order for the Manx government to push through plans it already has to further cut services while pretending to seek public feedback.

But this is hardly new. A few years ago, our government also claimed to be running a public survey on end-of-life care, before introducing plans it had secretly made already to hand the whole business over to the island’s hospice. The survey was run by… oh, you probably guessed it…. a hospice employee, god-botherer and pro-life fanatic. You can probably also guess her findings and the government decisions that followed.

Since then the hospice has also run ‘public surveys’ on all aspects of care of the elderly and been awarded government monopolies to oversee such care. Most worryingly, this now extends to care of elderly people with Alzheimers, an area which it is doubly incompetent to oversee.

Even by the usual standards of the hospice movement, the island’s hospice is a mess. For 20 years now, whenever asked, I have said that I would not send a dog to die in the hovel they run…and I do not share the soppy attitude to animals held by most Manx people.

Manx ‘third sector’ organisations are, at best, run by people made redundant by government cutbacks, more usually by people fired by government because even there they were not considered up to the job and almost exclusively by close-minded god-bothers.

I have to suggest that if there is a genuine social problem the LAST person government should ask to define the nature, find out the details or frame possible solutions is an employee of an empire-building barnacle on the public purse.

Bitter pill

I just laughed and rolled my eyes when I saw Ramsey residents ‘tired’ of long queues at Lloyds pharmacies – Manx Radio on the Manx Radio website last week. It is complete garbage, and my only sympathy is for the pharmacy staff who deal with these numpties. I just marvel at their patience.

Most of the complainants are old whingers and middle-aged lead-swingers who simply do not need to be there. They have contributed little or nothing to society during their working lives – if they even worked. The nearest they get to work is begging a sick note off the doctor or filling in benefit forms.

By comparison the young staff (few are over the age of 30) fund their un-necessary medication and will not have the same luxuries when they retire because of the Ponzi nature of national insurance.

True, I also dislike being in NHS queues, such as hospitals, doctors’ surgeries or pharmacies. But not because of any fear of what doctors might tell me, and not because I’m averse to queueing.

I just hate being surrounded by people too irresponsible or stupid to take better care of their health. What I despise about them even more is the lack of gratitude for the way that their vacuity is serviced and paid for by the younger and far more responsible staff they keep abusing or whingeing about.

Yes, there are NHS problems, but they are staff related, not monetary. The root of the problem is too few people prepared to take responsibility for other people’s lives, and more particularly their own.

How do you fix that? Well, it would take a massive cultural change, which I probably will not see in my lifetime. Actually, I know I won’t because, on principle, I am making no attempt to stay alive longer than a decade once I retire. I simply don’t think my generation earned the public expenditure.

But here’s an idea to get it rolling. Cut all government funding to public health groups, such as anti-smoking, anti-alcohol, anti-obesity advocacy groups which operate ‘independently from’ (i.e. as puppets of) the civil service. At the very least make them fully open to public scrutiny and introduce professional annual audits to be conducted by genuinely independent experts, not their co-parasites. This would be a small step towards acknowledging that people’s health is their own concern and that they should be free to make choices about it, but also required to take responsibility for it instead of clogging up a GP waiting room every week.

I know, not going to happen. But until it starts to excuse me if I laugh every time I hear another sob story about long pharmacy queues or overcrowded, malfunctioning hospitals.

Did I miss anything?

So, is that it then?

Number One Parasite not only gone for good but buried?

TV showing something other than blank screens or wall-to-wall royal barnacles and brown-nosers interviewing each other 24/7 because there was really, really no point in showing more film footage of dumb Brits queuing to look at a box?

Shops, government services, banks and other necessary everyday facilities open again?

By the way, even the nearest petrol station was boarded up for the day yesterday, leaving their only town competitor down the road to profit (and add 2p a litre to the price for the day). Nice.

And why is it that only intelligent TV programmes were taken off during the royal mourning period? Actually, not even just intelligent, also include funny. On the night the Windsor woman snuffed it BBC4 cancelled a showing of Spinal Tap. After the funeral last night BBC2 cancelled Philomena Cunk.

A royal dies or gets buried and somehow people laughing at something else entirely on the same day is… what….treason?

Or could it just be that TV planners know the illiterate are more likely to revolt than the literate? After all, the illiterate would notice the absence of morning or reality TV much more than someone who can just turn such garbage off and read a newspaper or a good book.

What gets me is that for years we’ve been told (and even this week reminded again and again) that yesterday’s carnival has been planned for years down to the tiniest detail.

So why was it such a major league balls-up?

The whole of the UK and surrounding islands grinds to a halt for over a week because one rich woman snuffed it?

Seriously?

For example, as others have pointed out, one very overprivileged granny dies and everybody else’s granny can’t see a doctor, or even a care worker, or get their shopping done, or their gas and electricity reconnected. In what alternate universe is that good government planning?

Still, it might be interesting to know how much tourist income Queenie’s death brought into the UK. If it’s a lot, maybe more of the old parasites kicking the bucket could stimulate a regular trade.

Probably a non-starter though.  For one thing, most are so dull or repugnant compared to the ex-monarch that few would care, never mind queue up to watch the coffin pass.

For another, I very much doubt that much (if any) of the squillions earned by tourism and related businesses in the last week will ever be recycled as tax.

Think about it.

Security firms (depending on the sensitivity of the area guarded) either one step away from the criminal protection rackets who provide nightclub security or owned by chaps who went to Sandhurst with the chaps at the MOD.

Portaloos, crash barriers and other crowd control/public event paraphernalia run by companies whose relatives or drinking buddies work in the relevant council department.

And as for the flags, funny hats and other tourist memorabilia….the Private Eye hack who exposes all those dodgy companies had a long-running story on false director name scams. One repeat offender is an outfit who get asylum seekers (who cannot work or claim benefits) to sign their names as directors in return for cash payments. This outfit run almost all the companies and shops who produce and sell the tourist tat around London, including the airports.

So, good luck to the taxman charged with recovering the tax due on that little lot.

Not that I care. As promised, I spent a pleasurable day yesterday totally oblivious to the whole thing. Apart from BBC2 cancelling Philomena Cunk it was perfect. Most of the day spent with cakes and booze cackling my head off at the totally un-PC and surgically precise wit of Theodore Dalrymple.

Did I miss anything important?

I think not.

Happy Monday

Well, my day today has indeed been “enjoyably free of grief”, but I didn’t end up laughing through the two minutes silence.

My original plan had been to play the Sex Pistols version of God Save The Queen when the peasantry went silent, but that didn’t happen because of…well…family really. But something good happened instead, so I’m not complaining.

From listening to Radio 3 (the only media outlet musically literate enough to notice) I knew the music planned for the Westminster Abbey church service. It occurred to me that watching and listening could be a way to break through Dad’s Alzheimer haze and actually hold conversations with him. Because music reaches where other stimuli do not, especially to a musician with a lifelong involvement in brass, military and church music.

So I put my republican cynicism aside and tried it. I’ve just been up to his care home, where we watched the church service together on TV, with me pointing out the composers (Judith Weir, Vaughan Williams, James Macmillan, Hubert Parry……) as the pieces came up and telling Dad which were being heard for the first time or reminding him which had been played or composed for other royal events.

We listened carefully, marvelling at the sound, applauding when each piece went right, wincing at bum notes (noticed at least a couple) and laughing at the thought of what military bandmasters will say to the culprits tonight. We had long and detailed conversations about music in general.

Dad no longer has enough of an attention span to read music, or even a paragraph in a book. If he doesn’t have the song embedded in his long term memory he cannot play it, and the bit of his brain that recognizes this failure torments him.

Also because of the galloping dementia he loses track of time or what day it is, so cannot, say, put on the TV at a certain channel, day or time to see a Proms concert. But he can still appreciate good music or criticize bad if someone is there to see and hear it with him. I did that today and had what is a rare experience for me too, long conversations about music with someone else who knows about it.

So, I should at least thank the Windsor woman for facilitating that experience. Shame she had to pop her clogs for it to happen, but in my lifetime she gave me nothing else, while living off my and everybody else’s labour. Hardly a fair economic exchange, but with a world run by idiots you take the little you can get.

Happy days

Monday might be marred by the royal funeral. In normal circumstances it would not bother me, for these should be some of the happiest days of my life.

For example, two weeks ago the most painful and invasive hospital test of those I’ve mentioned finally gave conclusive good news. In brief, I am not terminally ill so will not be dead within two years (as the gloomiest previous prognosis suggested).

Two days after that I did something I’ve always meant to do but could never actually overcome my cynicism enough to try. I spent a day at a Buddhist retreat, learning rudimentary meditation techniques.

And the funny thing is it worked. Literally between two steps in a walking meditation exercise I had a genuine satori moment, and I couldn’t stop laughing, both in relief at a huge burden released and at the ridiculousness of the way in which it happened.

True, one of the side-effects of this is that at work I keep giggling at the way some people spend all day moaning about trivial or non-existent problems, which gets me funny or angry looks, but in general I am content.

Except today when my daughter, who I love to bits, turns 21. She also finally starts a university course she’s been working towards for years, despite personal difficulties.

So it should be a moment of pride and family celebration. Except that I was forced to leave my family home four years ago and haven’t seen her since. I am not allowed to see her on her birthday. I was even forbidden to send her flowers and wish her luck at university.

I have been offered no explanation why. None of it makes sense, and I suspect that if the situation was outlined in a Wodehouse story the reader would be rolling round the floor laughing at the inanity of all parties involved. This is both the human comedy and tragedy of true love.

There is nobody in my life now, apart from a father so deeply affected by Alzheimers that he can no longer have a conversation with me. But yesterday, as on most days when I am free of work, I took him out of his care home and talked to him anyway. Because he is my father, and that is what families do.

Or at least they used to, and the one I grew up in always has. I have no love for this new “family lite”, in which you walk away for good at the slightest problem rather than facing up to it and trying to resolve it.

As I said before, the human tragedy and comedy of love, all depending on where you are placed during the performance.

But about Monday ……

One positive thing about the wall-to-wall media grovelling to dead royals is that I learnt just how easy it is to turn off the TV and do something else.

Radio 3 saved me from such nonsense during the Covid panic because it ignored the wallowing in misery which dominated other media and public discussion. Prior to that it was a rare source of sanity during the years before I had the courage to finally quit a job I hated. It continues to be, quite literally, the reason I get up in the morning and broke my dependency upon what passes for media elsewhere.

The media furore around the death of that Windsor woman has sealed that break. By the time they have stopped wittering about the death of their Golden Goose I will have totally lost the habit of tuning in to news reports, watching BBC or Sky news channels, etc., having already lost interest in the low level ‘entertainment’ such channels spew out the rest of the time.

But at least I can put some positive spin on the death circus too. After all, it did give 21^st century Brits a week to do one of the few things they’re still fit for– standing around vacantly gawping at something useless and dead.

So, all things considered, maybe we should look on the bright side.

On Monday I have a day off work (sadly already scheduled, not a bank holiday freebie on full pay). I have already bought the cakes and booze, selected funny books and DVDs, and will spend the day enjoyably free of grief.

The noise you may hear during the mandatory minute’s silence will be me exploding with laughter.

Why Low Life?

People ask why I called this blog Manx Low Life when the term “lowlife” has such negative connotations, e.g. of individuals so despicable they can’t even be excused as ordinary decent criminals.

As I’ve explained before – and any Jeff Bernard fan would understand – the blog began as a fun project to explore how someone with his old school bohemian ideals would cope on the Isle of Man. And for the record, I’ve never shared this popular romantic myth of criminals as harmless Robin Hood Jack-the-Lad types. Criminals are feckless parasites who prey on the weak like cancer cells. Always were, always are, always will be. End of.

But as I approach state retirement age, it is also tackling a different theme. I chose to leave well paid but unsatisfying finance sector work to spend my last working years elsewhere for about half the salary. Partly I wanted to scale down for life on a state pension supplemented only by a small private pension. But I was also sick of running around after the rich and wanted to do something more useful.

I chose to lead a simpler life – almost a secular monasticism – with no luxuries, no nights out, no newish car or foreign holidays, etc., so have few complaints about the results. But most of my fellow workers lack other job choices, due to lives which began with poor education and minimal family support and in which they have become trapped due to the way contemporary Manx society works.

I never planned to become a sort of embedded sociologist studying Manx life at the bottom of the heap, but these days I rarely encounter any other segment of society.

To be honest I also no longer feel the need to. I have had it with middle-class navel-gazers and busybodies. I am, in fact, now officially severing all links with such yawn-mongers.

Within the next month or two I should have resigned and handed over my last administrative duties to a group I helped found 20 years ago. We did good work, but the original vision – a little club where open-minded folk could safely have energetic discussions of controversial issues – died long ago, as have all but one of my fellow founders.

In the last two years especially I noticed nothing but blind adherence to the thinking and policies of a UK parent organisation I’ve never taken seriously, and a membership who ask me to organize meetings then don’t even bother to turn up …. because it’s raining…. or there’s an omnibus edition of Corrie…. or…well, I no longer ask why, to be honest.

There are others who want the group to continue, but their witterings about religion remind me of a comment by an old Hungarian academic colleague, a survivor of the samizdat and underground university years.

He described those who safely and loudly criticized Stalinism years after its collapse as stabbing a dead dragon with wooden swords. Similarly, while I’m as opposed to religious privilege as I ever was, I cannot be bothered to beat up a toothless near corpse.  

For example, I’ve blogged on here before about the failure of Tynwald to get rid of morning prayers and the Tynwald chaplain – never mind the continued presence of a bishop on Legislative Council. But why rant about it? They’re hardly Putinistas. Like those “The End Is Nigh” street preachers, we can just laugh and walk past these semi-pro sad acts because such lunacy doesn’t affect my, your or anybody else’s life one bit.

So, I might poke fun at such lunacy and lunatics, as well as the hot air from their shoutiest critics. In fact I definitely will. From time to time I might even get serious about more worrying phenomena. But mostly I’ll just continue my experiments into having fun with minimal material resources, and spreading a little joy as I try.

Teabreak over…..

In  the months since I last posted a lot has happened.

The most significant is that my mother died. It was not an unexpected death – she had been ill with numerous serious ailments for years, which she bore with patience and humour. But the last few weeks weren’t pleasant.

 She had a fall, followed by a complete failure at A&E to diagnose major fractures which delayed treatment for over a week, and after that she was never the same. Her last days and her passing, though, were peaceful. I miss her like crazy every day, as does my dad, whose everyday life I am now trying to make pleasant and meaningful.

My own health has also been up and down. I regularly get sent to the hospital for tests to ensure there’s nothing serious or terminal, which are never quite conclusive and successively more painful and invasive.

But it isn’t the actual pain that upsets me. It is having to spend so much time around the Manx “worried well”. You may know the kind, but over here it is a way of life, in the way that filing false compensation claims is the nearest Liverpudlians have to a profession.  

Being ill is the most interesting thing that ever happened to such bozos. Not surprising that they cling on to it or are unable to admit that they are better. What else would they have to talk about, or what other excuse to bore the arse off anyone silly enough to ask after their health?

Anyway, enough grumbling. With this post I finally broke the dry spell. I am back, and hopefully disciplined enough to start regular, happier posting again.

Moving on, thinking positive

I’m so touched readers worried about my health after one of my recent posts, so I should start by putting their minds at rest. I was examined by a specialist last Monday afternoon and things are now looking better.

The health scare was sparked by an odd result from a blood test. After thorough examination the specialist ruled out the life-threatening possibilities. He thinks a false test reading may have been caused by medication I had just finished and the original diagnosis – that I might just have to live with a minor age-related medical condition – is the correct one. More tests will fully confirm that and work out a coping strategy.

So, all I can add is, “Thank You for your concern”.

Unfortunately, my good news came on the same day I learnt of a relative’s worsening condition. This ruined what was an otherwise good day, but at least confirmed my earlier decision to cut the self-pity and get on with life for the sake of others who need me.

After spending one of this week’s two days off on such issues I also went back to work in an understaffed, under-resourced workplace. Yesterday was a shift from hell, putting in a 12-hour day covering for valued sick colleagues. The problem was, one co-worker in particular exuded nothing but anger towards either staff or residents for the full 12 hours.

I still don’t understand why so many people who hate humanity enter care work. Some of it might be a hangover from days when Manx schoolgirls were not encouraged to study for qualifications, so left school expecting to do only shop or care work in between pregnancies. As they get older, increasingly dissatisfied with limited job opportunities, scarred by unhappy home lives and the other side-effects of low-income life, they just get more bitter and take out their dissatisfaction on weaker people around them.

You would think women now in their 40s or 50’s would be the last like that. The odd thing is that they are not – for which Manx culture and especially the Manx education system should take responsibility.

At least the youngest ones still enter the job for the right reasons. Some are also prepared to train themselves in the hope of moving on to senior care positions. One can only hope they don’t have that spark of humanity extinguished by their elders.

Meanwhile, tomorrow I face another SFH -though hopefully this time the humane will outnumber the psychos. I can only do my bit by trying to exude enough positive vibes to counter the misery-mongering.