NoBodies' Perfect

I suppose you’ve heard about the 108 year old woman in Deal, Kent, in Britain, who has been told she will not qualify for a new digital hearing aide for another 18 months, when she will be 110. This is proof, say those Americans who are either stupid or on the Insurance and Drug company payrolls – mostly members of congress and that idiot in the White House – of how terrible the British health care system is compared to ours. The argument is, of course, B.S. The little old lady currently has a working hearing aide she got from the National Health Service five years ago. What she wants is a better one. In America she would be learning sign language. A spokesman for the Eastern and Coastal Kent Primary Care Trust was quoted as saying, “The priority is given to patients who do not have an existing hearing aid.” Meanwhile, in American, the priority remains in obtaining a golden parachute for CEO for some drub company.
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Still, it must be admitted that the English have become very attached to their “red tape” way of life. June Trumbull is a 79 year old volunteer who has tended a flower bed for the last 8 years in her little village of Urchfont, Wiltshire. She cycles ½ a mile to the spot beside the road into the village, bought flowers and compost out of her own pocket, and works on the little garden, “…when the weather is fine and I have a moment to spare.” And then one day last week a highways inspector saw her at work and the compost hit the red tape. Ms. Trumbull must stop her work at once, say the regulations, until she and the village receive a Section 96 Safety License, erects 3 warning signs, dons a bright yellow “Safety Jacket” and has someone else act as a “lookout’”
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Ms. Trumbull’s response is, “I don’t care what they do to me. I will continue working on the flower bed…They can send me to jail, if they like. I just want to be left alone to do it.” But the highways manager for Wiltshire was not moved. “We require that people undertaking this type of work follow the same safety procedures as our own staff…” And then as a further sign he kind of missed the spirit of the ladies volunteerism, he added, “We provide both signs and jackets free of charge to any volunteers.”
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It all makes you wonder what happened to the Luddite tradition in England, and how the residents of that “septered realm “ keep from blowing something up or burning something down every once-in-awhile in an act of sanity saving anarchy. Well, they don’t. Mr. Richard Atkinson, age 31, recently celebrated his Luddite heritage by climbing up a pole in the dead of night and using a circular saw to remove one of those little video cameras that record anyone speeding on a public highway. Americans would, presumably, never stand for such an invasion of our public privacy, which is probably just as well since they found the beheaded camera in the shed behind Mr. Atkinson’s house. Mr. Atkinson then discovered that the life of a solitary Luddite is difficult at best. He had to pay a $16,000 fine and served 2 months in jail. But at least he was allowed to plead guilty to “perverting justice”, which sounds a lot more fun than what he would probably have been charged with in the United States; vandalism. Who wouldn’t rather be a Luddite than a Vandal?
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And then there is the English love of the odd balls and the strange, like Charles Sherwood Stratton, better known as “General Tom Thumb” and Joesph Merrick, aka “The Elephant Man”, and now the late Mr. Mark Bamber, who died last week at the age of 38. He had diabetes, but that didn’t kill him. What killed him was his weight. At death Mark Bamber weighed over 700 pounds, or 50 stone. They couldn’t find a hearse capable of carrying him, as his coffin was 7 feet 11 inches long, 4 feet 6 inches wide and 30 inches deep and weighed well over 1,000 pounds, so they hired a farm wagon pulled by two horses dressed out with black plumes atop their bridles. A forklift stood-in for the pallbearers.
The funeral director was quoted as saying, “It really was at the edge of what was dignified.”

The edge? Oh, I think we passed the edge about 400 pounds ago.
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His brother Ray noted “He was a very large man, very large, but he had a big heart.” Okay, I restrained myself from commenting there.. I was willing to feel bad for the man and his family, especially his 9 year old son who looks devastated in the photos. (Read the story and photo’s at;
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=60828&in_page_id=34
And http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=474295&in_page_id=1770
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But then I read the other quotes from Ray. He admitted that he, himself, is obese. And then he said, I don’t like the word obese. I think it’s a terrible thing to call someone” And then Ray went way over the line. “Everybody is getting larger”, he argued. “If we can’t fix that then we’ve got to start catering for it, like they do in America.”
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Excuse me, fatso? We’ll pass over the little line about “catering” to fat people because you are grieving, but what the hell did America have to do with this? We’ve got fat people too, but it ain’t like we invented them. Our Jeffery Dalmer ate his victims, but does that make us responsible for Idi Amin! I mean, George Bush is an idiot, as I already admitted. But does that excuse Tony Blair for acting like one too? You know, maybe we really are two peoples separated by a common language. I think you can over stress just how much we have to learn from each other, I really do.
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