HP Sacked for Maskcrime

 

I have a sad story to start the New Year, apologies. A brother hospital porter has lost his appeal following his dismissal for refusing to wear a facemask during the Covid 19 pandemic. Graham Fordham had over twenty years of service at Northwick Park hospital in Harrow, London; until a nurse reported him for not wearing his mask properly. He started wearing a self-declared exemption badge on duty but his management at the contractor Compass Group laid him off and then sacked him. At the time, early 2021, it was NHS regulations that all staff were required to wear a mask on duty, but Mr Fordham said that they made him feel uncomfortable. He has an underlying anxiety and depression problem, as do so many people in the modern NHS. Many other non-NHS people have made this complaint and have been allowed to remain mask-free in public. Since that year the government and various "experts" have admitted that the mask rules were pointless nonsense, what we "super-spreaders" have been saying for years. In a hospital that is obvious because we regularly train for quarantine and the PPA we have to wear to protect ourselves from airborne virus particles are more than just paper surgical masks. We've all seen them on TV; full plastic overalls, wellingtons, rubber gloves, goggles and proper filter masks similar to a gas mask. A member of the public might be forgiven for thinking the mask mandates gave people protection, but in a hospital nobody can maintain that charade. So Mr Fordham has been kicked out of HPing for something everybody knows is a groundless principle. This is one of those weird Soviet situations in which laws are imposed that are crazy, and everybody who enforces and obeys them know they are crazy, but they all have to go along with them anyway. Things will not get any better until people in vast numbers start turning to the government and saying that little word "no!" Source: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/dec/31/hospital-porter-sacked-for-not-wearing-face-mask-losses-unfair-dismissal-claim. I salute MEP&DBP Graham for his courage and sense of duty and I'm so sorry he lost his porterhood over this. I'd like to present myself as a test case for the fact, although it might not feel like it right now, that there is life after HPing. I wish him all the best for the future.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/02/coronavirus-portal.html.

Jumpers Update

See here for essential background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2014/01/man-falls-to-his-death-at-jr.html.

A "man on the inside" who is feeding me information, who I will not name for obvious reasons, has sent me the photographs you see above. I will neither confirm nor deny whether or not he or she took them personally. Also, before anybody gets any bright ideas, I have cleaned the images to remove any metadata. What you see here is the West Wing balconies I describe in the background article that were the suicide method for that poor disturbed patient. I have heard rumours of further patient suicides and attempted suicides at the JRH which have been kept out of the media. And they say you can't keep secrets in a big institution?... It's a piece of cake. The NHS makes Area 51 look like a market square. As you can see, the five foot glass parapets have been replaced by an enclosed window, exactly as we porters advised before the site had even been built. I wonder who will claim credit for "coming up with the idea"? Will anybody apologize to we, the porters, for ignoring our advice and therefore causing a tragedy through incompetence and culpable neglect? Do any more pigs need fuelling before takeoff?

Devotion

 

A friend sent me a remarkable video. It's only two minutes long, but it tells an epic story. The centrepiece of the upload is a visual representation of an event in Leeds in 1956. I don't know if it is a photograph or an AI render, you can hardly tell the difference these days; but either way it has astonished and moved me. It depicts nurses on an open-plan ward kneeling down around a table at their station starting their shift by saying a group prayer for their patients. The narrator then explains in a poetic style, with ecclesiastical chanting in the background, how actions like these used to be sacred. Nursing used to be a job traditionally done by nuns. These actions were not just religious; they were an expression of patriotism and a love of the nation's people. This has now of course changed beyond all recognition. In just the space of a few decades it has become "an illegal act, one that could bring its participants into direct conflict with the regime." Did he know the story of Sarah Kuteh too? See: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2016/12/nurse-sacked-for-praying.html. We now have a "profane" authority that feeds us cultural Marxism and greedy corporations that sell medical treatments that kill; and then they cover their arses in corrupt courts. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBzoBP3kG3A. This video is painfully nostalgic, but also inspiring. We have not lost these memories and perhaps they can drive us to build a better country. I left the following comment on the video that the creator gave a heart: "I'm a former hospital porter with 23 years service and this short video stunned me. A nurse was actually sacked for praying recently. Sarah Kuteh, an ITU sister."
See here for more information: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/08/political-correctness-portal.html.

Andy Owens in FT

 

The paranormal investigator and hospital porter, Andy Owens, has had a letter published in Fortean Times. MEP&DBP came to my attention a few months ago when he announced he was going to try and solve the mystery of a missing person in Glasgow from almost sixty years ago, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/03/hp-seeks-missing-boy.html. Fortean Times is a monthly magazine based in the UK that covers anomalous phenomena like ghosts, UFO's monsters and similar enigmas. Its name relates to the famous supernatural writer and researcher Charles Fort (1874-1932). I've been a regular reader of it myself for some years now. Along with Nexus, it is an essential journal for anybody with esoteric interests. Andy's letter can be found in the current issue at the time of writing, issue 450 for November 2024. Being a HP is actually the perfect occupation for a Fortean investigator because hospitals are one of the top places to find ghostly apparitions. There's a lot of discussion as to why that is. Generally such apparitions are often of people who have died sudden, unpleasant and/or violent deaths. Hospitals are buildings full of pain, suffering and fear; they are the place where people are most likely to die. It's a complicated subject though. The letter describes reports of strange encounters his colleagues reported in the hospital where he serves. These include unsourced sounds like footsteps and even seeing human figures where nobody should be there. Also, objects sometimes move when nobody is touching them. Andy himself experienced a strange sound when doing mortuary duty with a fellow porter during the nightshift. He also saw the door to an A and E cubicle move by itself. He shares my own frustration with the doors that were badly designed. I even kept a mental hit-list of all the malfunctioning pieces of equipment in my hospital that I knew off by heart. If only we had helpful ghosts that opened the doors for us, Andy laments. When my time comes, if I am trapped on the earthly plane I will do that favour for all my EP&DB&SP's still living.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2021/12/hospital-pm-scares.html.
And: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2015/07/alyson-dunlop-on-hospital-ghosts.html.

Malinformation 2- Marjorie

 

See here for essential background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/11/malinformation.html.
A while ago I wrote an article about the pros and cons of civvy receptionists, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/04/civilian-receptionists-yay-or-nay.html. Along with Rebecca another character stands out in my mind. Her name was... I'll call her "Marjorie". Marjorie was different to the other receptionists brought in by ISS Mediclean when they took over the service. She was older, close to retirement, and had no experience or training with the company or NHS. She was local and lived around the corner from where I used to live, although I never knew her previously. She made herself very unpopular with the portering staff from the get-go because she immediately appointed herself de facto supervisor of the department even though she held no portering grade at all. Her role was receptionist and dispatcher in the Maternity unit, later the Women's Centre, with no formal authority over us at all. She was also made a minor celebrity by being featured in the hospital newspaper in the column Radcliffe People, a spot that gave a profile of a particular staff member in each issue. This was an honour never afforded to me in all twenty-three of my years, yet Marjorie made within a couple of months. She was the right kind of staff member, you see. It seems she was being groomed by management to play this role; she was encouraged to act like our boss even though she wasn't. I remember she insisted on always keeping the key to the lodge safe so we couldn't even access our payslips without her permission.

Along with the general sense of privilege Marjorie was encouraged to feel was a certain amount of malinformation. For some reason, when there was any kind of mysterious criminal behaviour in the hospital, porters were always the first to be blamed, especially by her. This is despite the fact that, as I've explained before, all the worst offences in the OxRad world were committed by civilians, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2015/05/killer-nurses.html. There was an instance in the late 1990's when a number of staff had complained that their lockers in the Theatres department had been broken into and items of value had been stolen. When I was speaking to Marjorie about it she didn't go as far as automatically to accuse the porters, but she did say: "I can't imagine a nurse doing that." I could have made the point that she had almost no experience of hospital life, let alone awareness of the scandals I have reported on, but I didn't. With retrospect it was just as well because it turned out that two porters were to blame. A pair of brothers who suddenly handed in their resignations and left the country just before the net closed. I'm the first to admit we HP's are not perfect, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2023/12/hps-and-psychos.html. Despite this, it annoys me that Marjorie was enticed deliberately by management into this narrow-minded and entitled attitude. She was clearly being used by them for some purpose... but I'm not sure what exactly.
(The illustration above is not an actual image of Marjorie.)

Malinformation

 

I'm a big fan of Neil Oliver, in fact I consider him to be the new conscience of the nation. He has a perception and passion that crystallizes many people's experience of living in today's world. A few months ago he made an interesting video about what he calls "malinformation". This term obviously emerges out of that infamous 2020's buzzword misinformation, but it's different in a crucial way. Misinformation is information that is false (allegedly), a lie, created to deceive. Malinformation is information that is true, but people being aware of it has a bad effect of some kind on somebody for some reason. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a5fBGUqfBU. In one of those strange ways, the other day I had two supposedly unconnected thoughts pop into my head at the same time. Firstly, it struck me that it was malinformation to be proud to be a hospital porter. In fact I've had so many conversations with others that prove this. I remember being on an overnight ferry to Ireland back in 2002. I had gone on holiday with somebody I really shouldn't have, as I found out later. We spent most of the journey on the standard argument... "but you just push a trolley, Ben!"... "Yes but"... and you know the rest. Despite the fact I won the debate easily, as I always do when it comes to this one; my "friend" refused to change his position and he doggedly doubled down, wasting what should have been, and could have been, a happy sea voyage for us both. By the time we docked at Cork harbour he was very agitated and found a pretext to hurl abuse at me in front of all the other passengers as we were waiting to disembark. He had been subjected to malinformation and felt hurt and enraged by it. For him, this was like an attack by me, as if I had physically struck him or stolen his car. This encounter was not the only time it happened; and it happened with many other people. What is it about being proud to be a HP that makes it malinformation? I'm still not sure after about thirty-five years of experiencing it. Maybe it's because it discredits an established piece of generally received opinion that most people regard as essential for making sense of their world. It is strange, but by far the most hostile recipients of my particular brand of malinformation are HP's or ex-HP's; especially the latter. The best example has to be "Jack Shaw", see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2023/05/i-lied-to-jack.html. Perhaps it would force him to admit that he had been lured away by the bright lights of civilian life because he couldn't bear the low conventional status of HPing. He resented me because I was standing up to something he ran away from. He envied me. He envied me as a prisoner envies his cellmate who achieves a jailbreak. Perhaps readers have other ideas and can enlighten me, in which case, please do post them in the comments section. The other idea I mentioned, on reflection, probably needs a separate follow-up article.

Hospital Porters' Guild

 

Guilds are something of an archaic concept these days; in fact they have declined in most countries of the world during the last couple of hundred years. Guilds existed from the earliest periods of history right up to the 19th century. They are sometimes confused with a trade union; the two are very different, however a guild often served the purpose trades union are for in the modern world. A guild was an association of tradesmen which regulated the practice of their work, provided support and was a depository of knowledge and training. Guilds have influenced society in ways most people don't realize. A lot of towns have a public building known as a "guildhall", a meeting place for guilds. There is the City and Guilds, an institute for vocational education. The guilds founded public houses, which is why to this day they still have names like "The Bricklayers' Arms" or "The Carpenters' Arms". It could be even our very personal names were generated by the guilds. Common surnames in the English-speaking world are very often the word for a job: Smith, Gardner, Cook, Baker, etc. It may be that generally in the future, for reasons I detail in the other HPANWO media, we may have return to the days of the guilds. I think the first step would be to form a hospital porters' guild. There has never been one of those before. Even though some people are named "Porter" it must refer to a different kind of porter from the civilian world. A HP's guild would be of enormous benefit to our service. It would archive the endless tricks of the trade that are currently being destroyed through casualization and the haemorrhage of experienced personnel. It would replace the current corrupt and useless trade union movement. In Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, the author describes a foundry with its own internal company workers society. This group is frowned upon by the established steelworkers unions. No doubt a hospital porters' guild would be hated in the same way by UNISON. But what good have UNISON ever been? They threw us under the bus in the Great JR Hospital Porters Strike of 2015, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2015/08/jr-porters-strike-update-2.html; and all they do now is whinge about white heterosexual males and about how EEEEEEEvil we all are. To hell with them! I know a lot of people, even the six month wonders inside the HPing world, might wonder why we need a professional organization at all. I've answered that many times; too many to provide a link. Some of you may ask me why I don't go out and start a HP's guild then. I've done that. Really, the HPWA itself and The Gas Spanner HPANWO Radio show are an embryonic HP's guild. All we need now is our own pub, The Hospital Porters' Arms... Mine's a pint!