Walking in a Walsall Winterland

Or to be more precise Aldridge and Rushall. My thanks to a friend in Sunderland who gave me the title to this blog! These are the parts of Walsall you don't see when rushing (or crawling as the case so often is) through on the M6.

I do this walk very regularly and enjoy it immensely. It takes me from the edges of Cuckoo's Nook and through The Dingle and then onto Hayhead Wood. I then walk along the canal to Park Lime Pits, go around the pits, go back up the the canal to walk past The Manor Arms (well not always past, I've been known to partake of a beverage there) and then through to Aldridge again.

Today was a beautiful, sunny but bitterly cold day but I dressed for the weather, as did many of the other people that I saw walking along the route and thoroughly enjoyed the walk. Most of the time it was peaceful. I always find the noise from the model planes on the Airport Field an irritation!

There's beauty to be found even in Walsall!

The photographs were all taken on a very cheap digital camera, set for automatic.

Life at the Manor

This article brought back some bad memories for me. It is shameful that an elderly man should be treated (or not treated as the case is) like this. An apology has been made by the Head of Nursing at the Manor and the Coroner commented that Mr Westwood had not received the level of care he needed.

The problem as I personally see it though is that there are few that do get the care they require and need. To me this problem is in the ownership of the management who clearly do not give the leadership and direction that is so sorely needed, so wound up as they are in targets and figures rather than in the patients that they are responsible for. And yes I use the word patients and not service users or other euphemisms that have crept into our daily life.

Let me make it clear; I have met many staff from doctors to nurses to ancillary staff at the Manor who are dedicated and work tirelessly in the comfort and care of their patients but despite the shiny new buildings and state of the art technology, there is an endemic culture of mismanagement there.

Let's start with out patient appointments at clinics. I have had the misfortune of having attended countless such appointments at various clinics run by various consultants. The words brewery, inebriation and organise not, spring to mind. Not one has ever run efficiently. I am yet after 10 years, to see a member of staff within 15 minutes of my appointment time and my last visit ran up a record of a two hour wait before the consultation. No apologies were offered and no information was given as to how long I may be sat there for. Taking into account that my appointment was set for only 10 minutes after the start of clinic I wasn't expecting a flight time check in wait. It's no use making a complaint as I have discovered because all you get back is patronising platitudes that mean nothing are are worth less and a displeased consultant who is none to happy with you.

In the brand new out patient in the shiny new PFI funded building, clinic patients are to be issued with pagers if clinics are running late in order that the patient can go wander around the various franchised catering outlets and be paged when the consultant is ready to see them. Presumably the pager manufacturer is working flat out to furnish the hospital with the outrageous numbers required! Why can't the hospital management come up with a better run system? One say that does not book three or four patients into the same time slot with the same consultant? Other hospitals do. I have frequented the QE in Birmingham and the Children's Hospital also in Birmingham on a fairly regular basis and their clinics do run far more efficiently. Never at either of those establishments have I waited longer than 30 minutes after the appointment time and frequently have been seen on the dot.

The crux though: Mr Westwood was subject to the type of lack of care and attention that my mother encountered at the same hospital in 2004. Since then we have been assured that practices have improved to go with the beautiful new facilities. It seems not. I copy below part of a blog I made back then about the lack of care and treatment Mom received.

"As I entered the ward I was struck by the most powerful and overwhelming smell of urine and faeces. The further you get into the ward, the worse it gets. There is no getting away from it. Unbelievably the ward is carpeted and it is the carpet that I can smell. I was not the first to complain about this and I wasn't the last. The ward was an orthopaedic one which due to its nature meant that many of the patients were elderly who had suffered nasty fractures. Incontinence is no stranger to the elderly especially when they are distressed following a fall. Whoever made such a pathetic decision to lay carpet in such a ward should have their noses rubbed in it.

Mom was a patient for eight weeks. For about half of this time she lay flat on her back unable to move and therefore subject to the whim of the staff when it came to bedpans and feeding. Most of the time her meals were removed uneaten and no remark made. Trying to feed yourself whilst lying flat on your back and being in incredible pain is difficult to say the least. Mom had called for a bedpan several times but had been unable to produce the goodies. This meant that when she called for one again the staff started to get a little slack. She was worried about this and mentioned it to a nurse. The nurse told her not to worry and if they didn't get there in time to "just shit yourself, everyone else does and we have to clean it up anyway". Not only was Mom helpless but she was now having what little dignity she had left brutally removed from her. Naturally the staff member who said this denied it when I made my written complaint but I have since encountered several people who have spent time on the same ward and have been told exactly the same thing. I suspect it is unwritten hospital policy.

A couple of days in I sat down at visiting time next to Mom's bed and remarked that the urine smell was even worse. Mom whispered that the night before her urine bag (she had a catheter fitted) had not been emptied and it had got so full it burst.

One night after a week inside I received a desperate telephone call from Mom at 10pm. They were moving her to another ward. No warning, nothing, just like that. They had waited until after I had left at 9pm and then moved her. Now I accept that people have to be moved in order to take account of operational needs but why is it done when relatives have returned home? Mom was very upset because of the stressful situation she was in as well as the unremitting pain.

The move turned out to be a good one once Mom had settled into the new ward. She wasn't moved again and over the next few weeks through better pain management and physiotherapy began to become more mobile again. However distressing experiences were plentiful. One elderly lady came in with two broken wrists. If my mother had not helped her to feed, that woman would have starved because nobody ever helped her with her food. Another woman discharged herself and went home to no support or help because she did not want to be sent to a care home miles away from her own home, meaning that her only visitor, her lodger who suffered from alzheimer's would not have been physically able to visit her. Pain management for some patients was a joke with them having to fight for something a little stronger than a paracetamol."

It saddens me to ask you to compare and contrast with the lack of care and treatment that Mr Westwood received. Little has changed including the Chief Executive, although the carpets have gone thank goodness. The culture of an organisation for me, comes from the top. If the top executives refuse to address endemic practices and attitudes then they spread and fester. If however they realise that enough is enough and that bad practice, bad care and bad treatment will not be tolerated and stop worrying about financial figures for long enough to actually think about how a hospital should be run, for the benefit of the patients and not to further their own careers, then it can change.

Like I said there are some really wonderful staff at the Manor. Pity they're not having a say in how the place should be run.

Remembrance: An Ordinary Life

The man above is my Great Grandfather Frank Keys. Frank was born on 13th November 1885 in a back to back house in West Bromwich. He was the third child of William and Martha. William had been born in Adstock in Buckinghamshire, a place where once the Keys had been a prolific family and had owned nearly all the horses in the village along with decent parcels of land. Over the 19th century the Keys family gradually left their Bucks roots and dispersed around the globe searching for work and a better life than the awful agricultural poverty that had become the norm in places such as Adstock during that century. William went with his parents to the Black Country and followed his father into the brewing world and worked as a malster, as Frank later did too.

Frank's mother was Martha. From what I have discovered her life was full of misfortune. She had been born in Evesham Workhouse, the second illegitimate daughter of a single woman who died when Martha was just 10 years old, not that Martha had really known her Mother because she had been sent to West Bromwich at a young age to live with an Aunt. Her elder sister died before Martha's first birthday.

Martha was just 18 when she gave birth to her first son, Frank's eldest brother William. Nearly three months later on New Years Eve 1882, William made an honest woman of Martha and married her. There soon followed Frank's one and only sister Charlotte. Frank never knew her though because she died a year before his birth.

Throughout his childhood Frank would have got used to the regular arrival of a new brother. Eventually Frank became one of seven brothers. He would have known pure, grinding poverty. These were mean streets of the worst kind of back to back housing but the poverty would have been through the low wages paid by the local main employers involved in iron making, steel spring manufacturing, glass manufacturing, mining at Sandwell Park Colliery, chemical production ironically owned by a different Keys family one of whom became the Mayor of West Bromwich and the eight breweries. Labour was cheap because it was so freely available.

By 1906 Frank had met Ellen Smith who worked as a hand gummer in a printers. Ellen herself had roots in Buckinghamshire. Ellen found herself pregnant in early 1907 and at the end of March that year she and Frank married. Their first daughter Doris was born later that year and she was later joined by a sister Edith and then Daisy. Shortly after Edith's birth, Frank and his family moved from West Bromwich to Aston, possibly the prospects in brewing were better there than West Bromwich where breweries were closing.

In 1906 Frank had lost his father William who died at the age of 42 in the month of June through cystitis pyelitis; an acute bacterial infection of the bladder and kidneys possibly caused because William was diabetic or had renal failure. In 1913 Frank's mother Martha died. She had just about made her fiftieth birthday. Frank's brother Harry had left the UK the year before in October of 1912 to seek a new life in Canada.

In January 1915 my Grandmother, Gladys was born. She was Frank's last child and she never knew her father because shortly after her birth The Great War became reality and Frank enlisted in Birmingham in the regiment of the county of his birth; The South Staffordshire Regiment. According to records Frank was attached to the 1st battalion but the Commonwealth War Graves Commission say he was in the 12th. I suspect he was in the former because the 12th although formed in Brocklesbury in June 1916, did not arrive in France until October 1916 and by then Frank was dead.

Whatever battalion Frank served in what is clear is that he was in France on 1st July 1916 when The Battle of the Somme began. Frank died of wounds on Friday 14th July 1916. He left behind his widow Ellen and four daughters whose ages ranged from 8 to 18 months. He was just 30years old. An ordinary man who had lived an ordinary life.

Frank was eventually buried in Serre Road Cemetery No.2, Beaumont-Hamel. This simple fact was not know about by my Grandmother until 1989 when I wrote to the CWGC and they kindly supplied the information. In 1990, nearly 75 years after Frank had died a family group including my Grandmother and myself visited his grave for the very first time. It was an emotional day. We remembered this man who had lay for so long in a foreign land along with all his comrades, who also were ordinary men with ordinary lives, all of whom left behind people they loved to die within the slaughter of their generation.

We cannot know precisely what Frank encountered and what horrors he may have witnessed but because of the experiences of others we can guess. We remember them all and the sacrifice that they and their families made.

This photograph is of Ellen Keys and of her and Frank's daughters.

A memory rediscovered....

I was going through a bag of papers today. I had discovered the bag at the bottom of a chest in my bedroom, covered by years of bits and pieces. In amongst receipts, old notes and other unimportant bits and pieces I discovered this note:

"hang on the notice board please

When i am a teenager when i leave home remember i am still part of your life. I will visit you and I hope you go to heaven. Same for you dad. I will love you whatever happens. I hope you'll be happy and have a good future

baris age 7 and 3/4"

It was hung on the notice board for the pin holes are there but I have no recollection as to when I took it down. I do remember though the conversation that prompted the note. The usual one that parents have with their children following the declaration by a child that when they grow up they want to marry you.....such memories. I'm so glad that I have rediscovered this precious note.

Alone and not lonely

Those who are with me on Facebook know that back in September I enjoyed four nights away on my own in Devon. This was the first time I had gone away solo since before my son was born more than 16 years ago. My Mother didn't believe that I was going alone and neither did quite a few other people so I waved my double room for single occupancy booking for all to see!

It's not as though I haven't trod the solo route before. I did frequently before becoming a Mother. It's never bothered me being on my own as much as it appears to bother others. It has many things to recommend it such as not having to take the wants and needs of a companion into account, doing whatever you fancy doing without having to explain why, eating and sleeping when you want to, being free and through being free, using that freedom to allow your mind to wander in whatever direction it cares to take without interruption or disruption. That time to think and to touch your own soul is precious and is experienced by so few.

Ask yourself when was the last you were truly on your own for more than a couple of hours? Do you actually have time to allow true free thought? I value this solitude so much.

Of course there are negatives to being alone. Nobody to turn to to express delight at some view or experience and to share that with them. Nobody to chat about the day that has been. Nobody to discuss some of the things you have had the time to think about! And there is the safety aspect that many seem to place above all other considerations. Whilst walking on my holiday I stopped to pass the time of day with other walkers, to admire the views and all were surprised that I was walking alone but being on my own revealed to me that there are many men that walk alone and I bet they don't get the note of surprise that I get when revealing the solo nature of their exploits. It is amazing that in the 21st century a woman partaking of an activity alone is still considered to be doing something abnormal and yet a man doing exactly the same thing is not. There are many measures of when true equality will have been attained and this is definitely in the top ten for me.

There were two occasions whilst I was away when a worry about what might happen flitted briefly across my mind. The first was when I was walking through a quite densely wooded area which had the added attraction of steep cliffs too. I noticed a man ahead, probably about the same age as myself, also alone and he noticed me. He slowed considerably and it wasn't long before I had drawn abreast of him. We exchanged pleasantries but I made it pretty clear that I didn't want company by picking up my pace in an effort to draw ahead of him. He shadowed my every pace even when I slowed down and then increased pace again. That was when the thought made a brief flit. I came to a halt and decided to light a cigarette. He stood there watching me. He wasn't taking the hint, he even reached into his pocket and brought out his own cigarettes, which was when I firmly but politely explained that I wanted to walk alone and he was preventing me from doing so. He made an unrepeatable remark but moved on and I sat down and gave him a full half an hour and a dozen other people walking in the same direction before resuming.

The second occasion I really was rather silly but it was so invigorating! 'No access to the beach' the sign said. What beach I though to myself. Looks like sheer cliffs to me. So I followed the pathway and eventually it became apparent that there was a lovely little beach some 500 feet below. The path was steep and in very poor repair and I ended up scrambling using both hands and legs, crawling on all fours when necessary to get both down and then on the return, up. It struck my mind that if I did fall I would be without help for a long time as there was no mobile phone signal and there wasn't a soul around but any misgivings were replaced by total euphoria at having that little beach to myself for half an hour, just sitting watching the waves crashing on the sand and the birds circling overhead.

I've never minded being alone in the city late at night either. The nights I spent in the student union bar when I was at university in London, getting the last tube home on my own and then the 20 minute walk the other end. People said I was being silly and taking risks but to be honest the only risk I ever considered I was taking was not being able to make work at 8am the next morning.....I rarely did (good job it was flexi time) or not being able to hold my bladder until I got in....I always did! I still do it now and whenever anyone expresses concern I point out that I really am in the wrong demographic for being attacked. It is young men between the ages of 16 and 25 who are most at risk, not old biddies like me!

The one thing that my holiday did for me apart from rejuvenating me, making me feel exceptionally happy, fulfilled and fit was made me realise that I really should get away on my own more often, money permitting!

As Deeprak Chopra says "To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions."

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing...

if you live in the Borough of Walsall that is. If you got yourself an education you might then realise that the people in charge of your local council are ignorant. So the council is making plans to ensure that the local population gets no access to books, or maps, or newspapers or the internet through a local library.

It's taken me a while to calm down about the article shown aside. I was so incandescent with rage that I have been unable to put fingers to keyboard and articulate how I feel about this. Until now.

Councillor Mike Bird is the leader of our council. It's his third crack at this job having twice previously in the last ten years been ousted from the role by his own party; the Tories. If ever David Cameron wanted an example of how differently his cultivated image of the national party is to the reality of a local image and how corrupt and bereft of ideas a local party can be, then he could find no better exmple than the Tories of Walsall. Councillor Bird hits the headlines regularly due to his chronic foot in mouth disease. Back in July it struck when he tried to defend the system of councillor allowances in Walsall that give him an amount of £29,000 per annum. Apparently he's worth every penny because if he was in charge of a 750 million pound budget in the private sector he would be pulling in salary in excess of £100K a year, which rather conveniently ignores the fact that as in common with other local councils, Walsall has a Chief Executive on a salary of £180K per annum!

Councillor Bird also defended these grossly inflated allowances for what is supposed to be a public service and an honour by saying that he works so many hours for Walsall Council that his hourly equivalent is £1.64. This is where it's best to keep the local population ignorant and uneducated otherwise they might calculate that £29K, £1.64 per hour mean he works 345 hours a week. Perhaps Walsall Council did a Napoleon and changed the way we calculate and look at time here because much as I try I still can only find 168 hours in a week!

Walsall has managed to pull itself up to the lofty heights of 130th in the pupils gaining five GCSE league tables, that means there are only 20 local authorities with worse results and might be why local schools are enforcing choices at Year 8 for a three year GCSE course, see my blog here. However Walsall has been busy casting aside and losing any cultural identity it did have for many years. You only have to look at how the birthplace of its most famous son, author Jerome K Jerome has been treated as a good example. Still close the libraries and even less locals will have heard of him and therefore it really will not matter!

Another reason for keeping the locals ignorant is you wouldn't possibly want them to know about another literary figure; Big Brother. Back in May this year, it was revealed that Tory Walsall Council were the third most likely to spy on you council in the country and our hero and gracious leader said 'I'm proud that we do this.When I'd heard that we'd come third, I was disappointed. I wish we'd come first. Now we've got something to aim at next year'! He was also proud of the fact that Walsall Council do not tell innocent residents that they have been subject to covert surveillance, sometimes for weeks and months. And this man represents these people!

I have digressed long enough. Walsall Council has some pretty diverse wards. Some are leafy, middle class and a pleasure to live in. Others are some of the most deprived areas of England. In the west of the borough life expectancy is some eight years less than in the east. Whichever way you look at it, in terms of education, health and employment, Walsall figures in the bottom 25% of the country. This does not seem to concern Councillor Bird however who thinks 'People can download books, we don't have to have bricks and mortar to give people access to reading materials any more'. This conveniently ignores that many people he represents do not have access to i-pads and kindles or broadband internet even in the relatively well off ward that I live in. My local library is two minutes walk from house. I use it regularly as do my children. We don't use it for the internet facilities, although they are useful when there for trying to track down books and articles. We use it to borrow books and maps and study materials that we cannot afford to buy. My one observation of our local library is that it doesn't matter what time of the day you visit, it is always busy and the computer terminals always packed; older people during the day and students in the afternoons and early evenings.

Hitler and his Nazi's burnt books. Looks like Councillor Bird and his colleagues are about to join their illustrious company. Unless of course Cameron does take a look at this disgrace of a local party and how it has mismanaged Walsall Council over the last decade or so (making national headlines in several occasions) and that those who are within at a local level take a good, long look at themselves as well and perhaps come up with some other money saving exercises that would mean that this most loved and needed of public services is retained. Personally I would start with allowances for local councillors and the Chief Executives salary. I also sincerely hope that the local electorate do the decent thing next May. However because of the way the wards of the council are made up, it is unlikely that anyone but the Tories could ever gain control of the council.

Black Stuff

BBC4 have recently been showing the whole of the devastating 1982 series Boys From The Blackstuff.

Alan Bleasdale wrote this comic-tragic commentary on what happens when an economy is not run with the ordinary working person in mind and I had forgotten just how emotionally gripping it is. Like many I watched this series when it was originally broadcast. I was just a youngster back then and politically naive but not so stupid as to not realise what a true to life depiction this drama was of what I saw around me every day. Who can forget Yosser Hughes and his catchphrases 'gizza a job' and 'I can do that' and the sorrow of seeing a man completely disintegrate and lose everything; his wife, his children, his home and his sanity.

There was dissent about this drama when it was shown; some people down south could not accept this as a true to life depiction and talked about the feckless unemployed and how they should get on their bikes and I remember wondering at the time, why would they think that, we all live in the same country, don't we? Two years later I moved to London and discovered that we didn't all live in the same country, not when it came to how Thatcher's policies affected the lives of individuals. It was different down south. Sure there were unemployed people but the ratios were vastly different. The economy was completely different. No wonder there was and still is to a certain extent, a north/south divide.

As I watched Yosser last night, my mind was drawn to what is in store for us all when the levels of budgetary cuts are announced on Wednesday. We like a little self flagellation we Brits, we take it because we know a little pain is good for us, builds our strength and character. Trouble is, it can all get out of hand and those who have the power forget how those at the bottom who don't have a voice or don't shout loud enough to be heard or have simply given up hope, can be pushed to absolute rock bottom 'for the good of the economy' and so that 'your children and children's children don't have to pay for our mess'. What happened in the late 70s and early 80s destroyed a whole way of life for some. Communities never recovered properly from virtually all of the employment in that area disappearing. We lost generations; men in their 40s and 50s that never saw paid employment again and young people for whom there was no possibility of a job until it was far too late for them to know how to work.

I don't suppose our political leaders have been watching the series. Pity really, they might have got a gentle reality check; that the decisions they make affect real people and can ruin lives. I suppose it all depends on your individual political perspective. Me? Well I don't see two and half million jobs suddenly appearing in the private sector to replace all of the jobs that will be lost in both public and private sectors because of the cuts that will be announced on Wednesday. If someone does see where they are going to come from, please tell me. I'm all for believing in miracles. I also believe in a steady and progressive action that is sustainable. A bit like losing weight; lose too much too quickly and you end up in worse trouble than before you started. After all, if you tighten your belt too much, you can't breathe.