A & E visit to a NHS hospital

I had my second Astra Zeneca jab recently.  About week and half ago, my head started constantly aching. I took paracetamol (Panadol) 3 times a day to ease the pain. To make matters worse, my blood pressure started going up as well. By Thursday and Friday, it had gotten much worse and I called the GP. They advised me to call the NHS using their 111 service, who in turn told me to see the GP. On Tuesday, I called GP again and the doctor advised me to go to the nearest A&E in order to get a blood test done now that I had taken the vaccine. This was to check D-Dimer levels in the blood to rule out possibility of serious blood clots forming.

I didn't want to stay in A&E for seven, eight hours with Covid-19 around so I asked the GP to write a letter to give to my Private Healthcare Provider so I could go private. She agreed but insisted that, because private hospitals may take a day to arrange an appointment, using the NHS A&E was better. I decided to adhere to her advice and my wife dropped me at the North Middlesex hospital's A&E at around 1:00pm.

There were only 3 people in the queue to the receptionist, and within 5 minutes I was directed to a waiting hall. There were about 30-40 people in there and 5 or 6 rooms with specialist nurses who were trained, like doctors, to do the initial check ups. It took only 15-20 minutes for them to call my name. The nurse checked my blood pressure and sugar level, asked some questions and decided I should see a doctor. 4-5 minutes later I was called to a phlebotomist to have a blood sample taken for the tests. 

I was later moved to the bigger waiting room on the other side and told to wait for the doctor's call. About 30 minutes later, a Doctor Riva came and asked me to come to the patient room. She checked few details with me, did some testing and assured me that I did not have a problem, despite the high blood pressure and headaches. It might have been migraine but she was going to consult with a specialist and then come back to me. In any case, I had to wait for the blood test results as well.

After about 10 minutes, she returned and told me that the consultant agreed with her. She apologised for the delay in getting the blood test results. "We're a bit busy," she said. There were about 50 people in the waiting room. 

I was told that if I wanted to go home, she could call me with the results and that if they were bad I could come back to the hospital. At around 4:00pm I was on my way home and received the call from Dr Riva, who told me the D-Dimer test results were good and that I was in range.

Amazingly, the whole process took only 3 hours. A courteous, efficient care and service by the NHS. 

Well done. 

Train Ride in Wales Caernafron to Protmadog_2

Train Ride in Wales 2012- Caernarfon to Porthmadog -1

Journey made in 2012

The Quarantanians

It's already the 8th day of the quarantine period. One can walk up to 300 meters to the left side, then 250 meters to the right side and hit the walls and security. Then one can walk up to 300 meters to the front, there is the beach. You can walk 150 meters up and down the beach but not allowed to go beyond the yellow line. You can come back and walk by the swimming pool, climb up the staircase about 20 meters to the upper floor rooms. That's about it.

Once a busy hotel, but now the place is almost empty apart from package tourists from Kazakhstan or China and us quarantenians. No Germans, No Brits, No Russians. At times silence is deafening. There are only 2 police officers and around 10 private security personnel. You know that there is a world outside these walls, from the facebook 😏. It's more like Soviet Union or East Germany but in a smaller scale. Anyway, the point is, you can get used to the situation and accept it as new normal. Then someone asked what about North Korea. Immediate reply was "oh there are Government run hotels". I hope second dose of the vaccine will make the difference. There you go. Happy quarantine day.

I was given a Vaccine, I posted in facebook

I was given the Astra Zeneca Vaccine and  I posted it in facebook. I said thank you to NHS. It riled some people. 

One reason I posted in here that, I was given the vaccine against the Corvid 19 is this, I was talking to a young man about 24 years of age and who is still believing in fairies. I seriously thought he is one of Peter pan’s long-lost sons. He told me that vaccine has a small chip that is very difficult to detect. Through that chip government can dictate to us what we should do. We will be fed wrong information. I told him that’s already happening through YouTube, face book, twitter and other media anyway. They don’t need a chip to insert.

Then he said they can control us and we will become robots. So, I asked him, are we going to walk like Robots as well? To that he has no reply.

And I found out that his whole family, mother, fathers, sister, aunt, uncle , gran and all of them think vaccine is not needed. Face mask is BS and whole coronavirus saga is a lie.

Well, I asked them what about the deaths?

They asked me, have you seen them? I said no.

“Well, there you go. No one saw these deaths. All these numbers are media lies. Hospitals are empty.”

You know what, first time in my life I stopped arguing. Because I was laughing so hard I forgot to argue.

--It is not me who wrote this false story. _ RobotR2D2XYZ0101010122£$%

East German simple food - Schichtkraut aus der DDR

These days, Ines enjoys testing different types of food recipes on the family. I call them Lockdown Recipes. Yesterday she tried out a recipe we’ve never had before. She told me that it was an easy old GDR recipe (GDR standing for German Democratic Republic, or the former East Germany, as it is better known).

Apparently, it is called ‘Schichtkraut’. It’s pronounced ‘Shiçt-kr-out’* (see below) but for the sake of convenience I omitted the ç. I was lucky Ines didn’t throw the spoon at me.

What I like about this simple recipe is that it only has 3 main ingredients: minced meat, cabbage and sliced potatoes. Ines added goat’s cheese on top, as well as cumin and other spices, and then put it into the oven for half an hour. And that’s it.

I call it 2 in 1 food because you can drink the sauce afterwards as if it were a nice cabbage soup. My stomach has very high acid levels, so this dish is ideal for me. It’s not very heavy on the stomach, and the cabbage and cumin make it easier to digest.

Try it if you’re interested.

*The ç is pronounced like the hissing sound between the ‘h’ and ‘yoo’ sounds of the 1^st pronunciation of the word ‘huge’. It’s difficult to learn, so can be substituted for a ‘k’ or ‘sh’ sound instead.

Cuba and the cold, hard truth - Cuba and the Cameraman

Recently, a friend of mine helped me reconnect with a four of my old friends who studied with me in the USSR through Facebook - another good reason to keep my Facebook account anyway. They were from Cuba, and Mr Rathnapala, the friend who helped me, was also working in Cuba at the time.

I have always had a soft spot for Cuba. It is partly because of the Cuban Revolution and its charismatic leaders: Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. In our youth, we had somewhat romanticised that revolution and its leaders. In somewhat of a pure ideological dream-world, we assumed Cuba was a socialist paradise, and that the USSR was a socialist heaven. To my utter surprise, some Labour party members in the UK also regarded Cuba as a model socialist country. 

Few years back, some even said they wanted to move to Cuba, and some still say that today. I think to myself, 'would you really enjoy living there when the mass media shows you how much they still don't have? I mean not only the freedom to chose your rulers, but comfortable life in the West. What's wrong with life in UK? Yes, it's a capitalist country but you still have the NHS as a free healthcare facility. If you don't have a job you are given government benefits. There are problems but housing is still decent.'

Although I have never been to Cuba, I studied in the socialist USSR during the '80s. I soon realised that it was no heaven, nonetheless we loved the Soviet Union in our own way. We enjoyed the hospitality of the Soviets and appreciated the free education given to us. It was a unique country. Coming from the island of Sri Lanka, it opened our eyes to the world. 

Living in the UK gave us the chance to progress and earn money. It was same for most of the other foreign  graduates who ended up in western countries like the USA, Australia, New-Zealand,  Canada and EU. They have now built new lives in these countries and settled in nicely. Some studied further and became educationalists, scientists and specialists in their respective fields. They used the opportunities they were given in the western world. But the nostalgia and yearning for the socialist USSR still exists among them.

I always wondered what happened to my Cuban friends. They played football and never forgot to call me even in the mid winter. Russian winter was very harsh, yet we played our football.  I have only found Uday, Osvaldo, Ariel and Rubén. Most of my other friends emigrated from Cuba to greener pastures. I can't blame them. Uday and Ariel live in Cuba and are happy there. Uday lives with his family. Osvaldo is working in Tenerife, and Ruben is in Argentina. Ariel, now a director in an Electrical firm, told me that life in Cuba after Soviet Union collapsed was very hard. I knew it was hard for the Cuban government because economic aid from the Soviet Union was invaluable to them. They also gave other types of aid in the form of cheap oil, military alliance, and support with the Cuban industry. All of this stopped after the collapse of the Socialist Bloc. It was a very hard time, and the existing US embargo against Cuba since the '60s did not help either. 

However, there have always been two opposing opinions on Cuba. The Socialists would say that Cuba had been developing fast, and that all would be well if the US embargo were lifted. And then there were those who condemned Cuba to be a third world banana republic. Although, as we all know now, Cuba has made lot of headways in their tourism and health sectors. Where is the unbiased truth? 

I watched a brilliant documentary very recently. Apparently, Fidel Castro never attacked the American people, however he always criticized American Foreign policy. He valued American achievement in science and other fields, never condemned it, and this documentary proved that. But when Castro flew to United states to deliver his speech in United Nation's headquarters, American immigration treated him very shabbily. They did not offer him any diplomatic courtesy. Castro accepted it with a smile on his face. 

The film was written, directed and produced by John Alpert. He visited Cuba in 

the 1970s. He was interested in Cuban history and its politics. The best days for Cuba were during the '70s and '80s; although there were shortages, generally life was good. Shortly after 1992, however, Cuba spiralled into an economic downturn when the Soviet Bloc collapsed. John documented this very sensitive time for Cubans with compassion and understanding. He didn't judge them when he met a family desperate enough to raid their neighbour's farm and steal the only 2 cows the farmer owned. Throughout many decades, he visited the same families over and over again. Some of them, he found out, left Cuba altogether after some years, like most of my friends had, who had studied with me in Moscow.

 Osvaldo goes back to his village in Cuba from Tenerife and happy to be back in his homeland. But Osvaldo and Uday have very different opinions. Osvaldo believes that Cuba needs a multi-party system. Uday supports the status quo, although he accepts it has its own problems. Uday said "Cuba is a good place to live, but really our economical system isn't working properly. We have to change many things in our economic system, but we can do it with one party. There are many reasons why our economic system does not work properly, but if we think just having multi party system would  fix everything, then we are wrong."

 And who doesn't? Look at the USA's very own Trump: he is not even leaving his post. Look at countries like Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan, who all have their multi-party systems but with corrupt politicians. However, I must say the Western world still doing much better economically than anywhere else.

John Alpert shows with his own excellent narration how Cuba lost their socialist zeal, and how it was tourism that finally saved Cuba. They may have stopped proselytising Socialism but countries like Venezuela still give them chap oil while having economic crisis of their own. Raul Castro slowly changing the Cuban economy. People can engage in limited trade activities, own their houses  and offer services in a limited scale.

I think Cuban socialism has failed, and that they must change their economic policies. There is no other way for them. We must accept the cold, hard truth, even if it is difficult. This is what John's film "Cuba and the Cameraman" showed me. 

I did not understand the scale of Cuba's deterioration after the collapse of Socialist Block until I saw this film.

Pictures were taken from Osvaldo Oliva. 

Photo taken at Moscow Power Engineering Technical University in 1985 or 1986. Front row Ruben and Uday, Behind them were Huertas, Jorge Benitez and Badia. In the background Omar Pino.

Director John Alpert on Making the Documentary