Tag Archive for: National Health Service

Going Viral: A Coronavirus Diary

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Coronavirus brings globalisation into focus by forcing attention onto the different layers of interconnectedness in our twenty-first century world. As the virus spreads around the planet in waves, the pandemic impinges on different social and economic sectors each according to its own rhythm, throwing them out of joint one by one. The synchronisation which normally keeps the whole system running harmoniously breaks down. It is precisely at the moment the system breaks down that we realise how interconnected it is. What is normally hidden because, as we used to say, it functions like clockwork, is exposed. We discover that while our clocks are nowadays calibrated atomically, public time is not at all uniform but constituted by the superposition of many different tempos.

Free Associations 78, 2020

Read it here:

Chanan 334-1265-1-PB

 

We Will Not Pay

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[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20236904[/vimeo]

At Saturday’s Progressive London conference, I caught up with comedian Josie Long and Mehdi Hasan, the NS’s political editor, and listened to Unite’s Len McKluskey and False Economy‘s Clifford Singer, plus ukuncutactivists take on Barclays Bank and South London celebrates a Carnival Against the Cuts.

Additional filming by Kaveh Abassian and Philippa Daniel. Philippa’s own video of the Carnival Against the Cuts is here.

 

 

Eyeful

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I was looking forward to being able to report that I’d had my second cataract operation, and am now ready to go out and face the world again with fresh sharp technicolor vision. It was not to be. I’ve just got home from St George’s in Tooting following a wasted day. After arriving in good time for my noon appointment, around 5pm Sister and one of the surgeons came to me—separately—to say that unfortunately there was no time left this afternoon to perform the surgery. (And me not having eaten since the crack of dawn because I was supposed to have sedation.) Almost the same thing happened on my previous visit a month earlier for treatment to the first eye. On that occasion the operation was carried out only at the very end of the afternoon. Read more