A Difficult choice!

As some of you will know I am a nurse, today in the post I received my RCN ballot paper. I am asked to vote on whether we should take industrial action regarding the recent pay offer.
This is a very difficult issue for nurses, we have a Code of Conduct which says we should do our patients no harm either by act or omission. However I firmly believe that our patients deserve to receive care from people who are skilled and knowledgeable and that if we wish to attract and retain these types of people to the profession they should be adequately renumerated. We are expected at even at staff nurse level to be educated to almost degree level, nurses during their training receive a pitifully low bursary. Many senior nurses are educated to Masters level, never mind all the other vocational courses we need to undertake to progress in our careers; many of these undertaken in our own time.We work antisocial hours and do a job that involves us in m any intimate and distressing aspects of peoples bodily functions and their emotional lives too. However I also believe that nursing is a profession I am very proud to belong to and this pride in my job and mt profession means that I could not take any industrial action that would compromise standards of patient care.

Electricity Pylons

Electricity Pylons
Originally uploaded by flickrzak
I heard this poem on Radio 4 today, I'd never heard it before but I love it and it's amazing how contemporaneous with todays concerns it is

Inexpensive Progress
Encase your legs in nylons,
Bestride your hills with pylons
O age without a soul;
Away with gentle willows
And all the elmy billows
That through your valleys roll.
Let's say goodbye to hedges
And roads with grassy edges
And winding country lanes;
Let all things travel faster
Where motor car is master
Till only Speed remains.
Destroy the ancient inn-signs
But strew the roads with tin signs
'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!'
Command, instruction, warning,
Repetitive adorning
The rockeried roundabout;
For every raw obscenity
Must have its small 'amenity,'
Its patch of shaven green,
And hoardings look a wonder
In banks of floribunda
With floodlights in between.
Leave no old village standing
Which could provide a landing
For aeroplanes to roar,
But spare such cheap defacements
As huts with shattered casements
Unlived-in since the war.
Let no provincial High Street
Which might be your or my street
Look as it used to do,
But let the chain stores place here
Their miles of black glass facia
And traffic thunder through.
And if there is some scenery,
Some unpretentious greenery,
Surviving anywhere,
It does not need protecting
For soon we'll be erecting
A Power Station there.
When all our roads are lighted
By concrete monsters sited
Like gallows overhead,
Bathed in the yellow vomit
Each monster belches from it,
We'll know that we are dead.
________________________________________
From "High and Low" (1966) & "Collected Poems"
© The Estate of John Betjeman

stained glass window detail st. neots

stained glass window detail st. neots
Originally uploaded by lizjones112

Today was rather wet! Decided to go and find St. Neots Church the stained glass windows there are stunning then on to Landhyrock a National Trust property, the house is very interesting and I particularly liked the kitchens but for reasons I don't understand they don't allow you to take photographs there!