Edinburgh used to have a Royal Infimary in the city centre, and lots of small specialist hospitals and clinics built decades or even a century or more ago, all usefully accessible to the people who used them.
Then we got an NHS Trust that looked at this spread of healthcare and said OOH PRIME CITY CENTRE BUILDING SITES, and sold all the land off to property developers and used the money to fund a Public-Private Partnership (ie, a big con) to build a giant hospital an hour's bus ride out from the city centre. Miles and miles from anywhere.
So while I love my dad and want to see him, I am getting really increasingly pissed off with the decision that means my evenings are occupied from 5:30-9:00 by travelling out to the Royal Infirmary, having visiting time with my dad, and travelling back again. There is nowhere to buy a cup of tea or coffee - the only cafe closes (I assume) at 6pm, since I've never seen it open. There is a sort of mini-mall in the main entrance, but the only shop open when I get there is WHSmiths, which closes at 8pm, which has tail-end sandwiches left by the time I get there.
(My first time, I thought to buy one of the meal bargains - you get a sandwich, a bottle of water/soft drink, a packet of crisps - but they'd run out of water the size that went with the meal bargain, I don't do soft drinks, and the sandwich / crisps were both being sold at the kind of inflated prices you see when a shop has (a) a captive market (b) a hefty ground rent.)
I'm feeling kind of lost and isolated at work right now because my colleagues are all frantic about other things and I'm feeling mostly "OMG DAD!" which of course no one else is. And I can see why they're frantic and would be sharing that franticness except that I don't have room for it past "OMG DAD!"
Off for my long bus ride now...
Then we got an NHS Trust that looked at this spread of healthcare and said OOH PRIME CITY CENTRE BUILDING SITES, and sold all the land off to property developers and used the money to fund a Public-Private Partnership (ie, a big con) to build a giant hospital an hour's bus ride out from the city centre. Miles and miles from anywhere.
So while I love my dad and want to see him, I am getting really increasingly pissed off with the decision that means my evenings are occupied from 5:30-9:00 by travelling out to the Royal Infirmary, having visiting time with my dad, and travelling back again. There is nowhere to buy a cup of tea or coffee - the only cafe closes (I assume) at 6pm, since I've never seen it open. There is a sort of mini-mall in the main entrance, but the only shop open when I get there is WHSmiths, which closes at 8pm, which has tail-end sandwiches left by the time I get there.
(My first time, I thought to buy one of the meal bargains - you get a sandwich, a bottle of water/soft drink, a packet of crisps - but they'd run out of water the size that went with the meal bargain, I don't do soft drinks, and the sandwich / crisps were both being sold at the kind of inflated prices you see when a shop has (a) a captive market (b) a hefty ground rent.)
I'm feeling kind of lost and isolated at work right now because my colleagues are all frantic about other things and I'm feeling mostly "OMG DAD!" which of course no one else is. And I can see why they're frantic and would be sharing that franticness except that I don't have room for it past "OMG DAD!"
Off for my long bus ride now...
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