Symphony: The Orchestration of Zero Tolerance.
The Banality of Evil: Bruton and Somerset's New Band
First: An Affectionate History
Have you heard of a small town called Bruton? If not, you haven’t been paying attention. The ancient, somewhat hick town has lolled across many a centre-spread, elbowed its way onto lists of the ‘best places to live ‘, and its desirability was stamped by people you may once have heard of, like George Osborne, Mariella Frostrup, and Kevin McCloud. The latter two have not actually descended the centurion Creech Hill with its helmet of oaks that guards its Northwestern flank, but they settled close enough to be lassoed for inflating its prestige. No illusion was spared for the puffing-up of Bruton on the map. God alone knows why. God and an encircling ring of Oligarchs who have circum-settled and throttled what was an unpretentious town of schools, more schools, another school and a station.
No illusion was spared for the puffing-up of Bruton
For those of us who knew it before the desecration, it came close to being one of the best places to live: simple, idiosyncratic and full of rustic habits and lunatic humour. The bonds that bound us were not that over-used, mushy ‘community’ but survival and just being here, with an inbuilt, omnipresent irony. Who, in their right mind, would choose Bruton? Well, we had. No help for us. Cheers mate.
I always thought 'vintage' was Montgomery's superlative cheese, rennet, and truckles, aged in muslin for months…
The latest addition to this lager has been Benedict Cumberbatch, but this rare specimen has yet to be sighted, unlike Richard Hollingbery, whose vulgar, six-foot posters for Godminster Farm are angled at every farm entrance and cannot be missed from any direction. His farm was proclaimed organic, and six months later, it was selling ‘vintage organic’ cheese, quietly produced by a local cheese maker nearby. I always thought 'vintage' was Montgomery's superlative cheese, rennet, and truckles, aged in muslin for months, not stamped out like cookies and wrapped in plastic. Silly me. I also wonder why a farm that has no shop or need for public access, whose roads are marked ‘private’, can mutilate the landscape with billboards.
The Councillor with those clanking pockets probably has the answer.
From dawn to dusk, the Popes mulched, mowed, potted and pricked, and smiled as you passed by.
Latterly, we have the addition of the South African uber-rich vintner, Bekker, whose acquisitions of every modest cottage and new plantations grow apace. For starters, he bulldozed the wonderful rainbow palate nurtured by sunlight and sunlight’s worshipper. It was a stone theatre, an ancient curved wall enclosing explosions of colour that once was Hadspen Garden. Originally designed and planted by that paragon of plants and planting, Penelope Hobhouse, Hadspen was nurtured for decades by the tireless Canadian couple Nori and Sandra Pope. From dawn to dusk, the Popes mulched, mowed, potted and pricked, and smiled as you passed by. It was a place to drop in, buy something you had never seen before, take the few friends who deserved it or wander alone. Almost always possible to be alone.
(New York, Zurich, Basel, Los Angeles, Monaco, Paris and…wait for it… Bruton, Somerset)
Now Bekker’s ‘Newt’ has replaced it with hard steps and, more conspicuously, a perpetually filled car park. As has the Hauser and Wirth Gallery (New York, Zurich, Basel, Los Angeles Monaco, Paris and Bruton, Somerset). Where once cattle grazed and grass renewed, we now have glinting seas of steel.
A few elderly women hoping for retirement distractions giggled at the thought of Bruton being ranked with all those glamourous cities, but the opening Gala Exhibition at Hauser and Wirth had them sufficiently bemused to wonder whether it was such a hot idea after all. The opener might have been entitled ‘The Death of Art.’ Red rag pompoms of varied dimensions hung like drops of dried blood from the noble oak beams, and paint-bespattered chairs roped together in the centre of each space looked to be waiting for the removal van. The old farmhouse, last occupied by the ancestral farmer who had the wisdom to die before witnessing what would happen to his beloved farm, was exhaustively daubed on every flat surface. If you can sleep in the middle of a nursery’s attempt at Jackson Pollock, a room can now be had for a night ‘from’ £500.00.'
‘The Death of Art.’
Hauser and Wirth are not into Art but installation.
The installation is the exciting and only moving part. Great cranes and winches close the road to rotate its weighty abstracts, pyramidal, cuboid or lumpen, every six months. There, framed by an antiquity it knows nothing about, it will sit, centred, irrelevant and alone.
a pricked pumpkin and it rots in just the same fashion,
Up in the Ouloff garden is a sort of building remaindered by the Serpentine Gallery that closely resembles a pricked pumpkin, and it rots in just the same fashion, livid eruptions spreading like melanomas. They paint over them once in a while. Unlike a Bull or Bear outside a Stock Exchange or the advertisement for paedophilia outside the BBC, these weighty installations have no message at all. Not so with their celebration of Christmas, with lights strung and suspended under women’s white knickers/ bloomers. A bit of a laugh? Or mockery in plain sight? Christmas is pants. We get it now.
That's Art, innit? ‘I’m too stupid, I guess?’
Stupidity tends to migrate to its restaurant, which does brisk trade. The ‘Galleries' are mostly empty except for the bored gap year students sitting to protect what nobody else looks at, who are now paid to be profoundly bored all day. The pompom creator, Phyllida Barlow, now has a collection of outsize vicious chisels protruding from the walls. They appear sharpened for somebody's execution. ‘Mindless Menace’ is what I would call this one.
As Pharmaceutical Companies are not peddling health, Hauser and Wirth is not peddling Art. Both are ‘fronts’ to legitimize, respectively, any demand on the NHS or a Council for ever more planning and ever more pretension. It is not the Art that spins the tills but the ostentation and the expensive food.
Bruton is now a gladiatorial ring, where wealth flexes its biceps and gestures with two fingers from behind its stone palisades until invited to score another triumph of ‘gotcha, I saw it first’.
You may well ask why, in the midst of the Israeli genocide and the end of Ukraine, I think this is worthy of your attention. There are similarities, although there are differences in scale. From this miniature, you can scale up.
Just as DNA holds the key to future development, the incremental destruction of what exists makes way for what would not have been possible earlier. Both Ukraine and Gaza have coveted ‘resources’, and populations are in the way. Same here. Context is all. The construction of the hyped Illusion relies upon agreement in what some call the 'elite'. [It is not a word I use for parasites, whose wealth protects them from the drudgery of actual work but permits preening at the prestige they can pay for. ‘Entitled’ is preferable. It covers both the ‘titled’ and those who think they should be.]
Fascism starts small.
Over the past four years, many of us have had to re-evaluate everything we thought we knew. About everything: the Wars, Churchill, the Banker Rothschilds, the Vatican, and such facts as America never won its independence, that the Federal Reserve is neither federal nor has reserves, and that Semites do not occupy Israel. They live(d) in Palestine. Zionists live in Israel but like to wear masks, calling themselves Jews—all that. The past was the crafted Illusion carefully orchestrated by the wealthy to obscure the Real.
In being asked to face the dystopian Real, the temptation is to believe that nothing of the past was real. This small story will defy that, to suggest that in many places the real lay in its past and the illusory is the crafted Present and its intended Future. Bruton is not yet a five-minute city, but things are in place and progressing.
I intend to lay an egg in this undistinguished nest and to show how it has come about, but first, I would like to weave a durable nest.
There will be many places like it, so let me begin with affectionate memory.
There are still vestiges of old Bruton; Windmills was the ironmonger everyone called him ‘Addapenny’. This diminutive Uriah Heep worked alone six days a week. His paper screws of screws made him moderately wealthy, but since he had neither wife, issue or time, I doubt he found that out. The place opposite him is still called Thomas and Gompy, once a haberdasher whose pretentious lettering over-extended its space, so it had to shorten ‘Company’ to ‘G’ompy’. Mr Gompy remained forever a ghost nobody knew because Mr Thomas was too embarrassed to admit he did not exist. A sweet shop tobacconist doubled for Halifax, and greengrocer’s crates gave colour to the pavement. The greengrocer used to stand at his welcoming open door but now sidles through his curtained shop windows to his rooms at the back; the same man, very stooped. We are few; we who remember.
In the sixties, there were ten pubs, some with ‘rooms’, some with gardens, some with an odd quiz, but none with football. It now has one with football. Bruton has medieval crypts beneath many central houses and alleyways it calls ‘bartons’. There is a pretty river, if you can find it. A down-sloping ‘barton’ will take you to the unimaginatively named ‘Lower Backway’ and the river. An ‘up-sloping’ barton will take you to Higher Backway and the State primary school, but you will probably miss it, searching for somewhere to park. It is a pretty school with verandas. Its teachers used to be dedicated, mature women, some Oxbridge graduates who delighted in teaching a small child to read.
Bruton's names are tired jokes. Lusty Gardens was the boundary which separated Kings' Boys from the brighter uplands of Sunnyhill's Girls. Sexey's School sits between the two. It began as a Grammar for boys but now juggles both genders. Some names were witty A grand-ish but crumbling building restored by an enterprising builder became 'Grant's Restaurant'.
Why 'Grant's'? I asked him
‘Cos I needed so many effing grants to get the bugger built.'
A Mr Fry, Petrol and Motor Repairs, something of a railway nerd, abandoned the soggy West End of town to move to the more bracing East End where his business could better sizzle in the station yard. Like an Egyptian Pharaoh, newly crowned, he set about building his mausoleum, a model signals box he called ‘Fry’s Halt.’. It cannot see or be seen by any train, but who splits hairs when dreams take over? He has not halted yet.
He also filled an old telephone box with a manniken hooker, maybe a personal defibrillator. All good fun.
There is still the mediaeval Almshouse, Sexey’s Hospital, where sheltered flats house the fortunately still independent elderly. They overlook a perfectly preserved 1638 courtyard or the Pigeon Tower, the roofless remains of the ancient Abbey that crowns its only hill. The residents have a south-facing productive slope of vegetable beds and fruit trees, a Master, a Warden, Visitors, and a Jacobean chapel of minute proportions and perfect preservation.
Anthony Trollope would feel at home once he had penetrated its bastion doorway.
There is a fine church, St Mary’s, with a curiously sloping nave and a fine Somerset tracery tower. Its new vicar, who arrived at the height of options for edicts and dominion in January 2021, also holds the keys to three other churches. So, he had four doors to slam and lock as soon as he arrived, four choirs to quell, and four scattered congregations who would do perfectly well without services. He was perfect for what Bruton has become. He pinned Ukrainian flags onto every church door and, despite his holy demeanour, knew how to put people in their place.
A request made of him by a recently bereaved widow to plant a spreading specimen tree in a barren chapel yard where her husband’s permitted funeral was allowed twelve—-no singing— was, after much consultation and delay, offered a shortlist of six approved trees from which to choose. She had visions of elegance, shadows and changing colours, but his list did not. Four of his choices were crab apples. She wondered who would rake the fruit before mowing the grass. Instead, she planted her commemorative tree on the road verge to wave at passing cars. The same widow was firmly told she could not be buried in the local church cemetery because she did not live in the Parish in which she had been paying taxes for fifty years.
She did not ‘qualify’ for a grave.
In short, a mini version of Justin Welby. Such fun to have your own diocese to demolish. As I said, it's a matter of scale. The current interregnum has restored the paltry services, but the vicar will get another bird flu/war chance soon. I have not noticed Palestinian flags; perhaps it’s the wrong sort of war.
Most day trippers in search of ART, or WHERE IT’S AT, miss both en route to be sustained/fleeced by Hauser and Wirth’s Roth Bar. To get there, they pass the King’s School. It deserves a paragraph to itself.
Despite its five-hundred-year history, Kings Bruton was never in the first division academically but was known for other reasons: relaxed, tolerant ease, good manners, and modest aspirations. Boys (it was only boys from 1519 to 1990) could go off to shoot pigeons, cycle home, march about in cadet uniforms and get bruised playing rugby.
All that has changed.
Kings Bruton has eliminated its oldest charming boarding house (the original School) and puts up KEEP OUT signs in regimented blue at every temptation to take a shortcut or a peak.
The Untermenschen it addresses as ‘The Public’ are not to trespass or walk, of an evening, around its deserted playing fields. Instead, the same Untermenschen put up with being unable to find parking at the beginning and end of term, get a restaurant table at weekends, or be served in a shop during lunch or break. Very few of them are old enough to know they have the right to walk where they are forbidden. Rights of Way are marked on the purchase conveyance of those fields, but should anyone venture in, there is an army of irritable elderly schoolmasters who shout imprecations and threats. The hostility of Kings School’s staff is curiously uniform, but none of the local lawyers are brave enough to challenge them.
The alleged ‘dolphin’ emblem on the King’s badge (see above) is a pretty good facsimile coelacanth with gnashing jaws. More appropriate—extinct, irrelevant, but aggressive. A combination with which we are becoming all too familiar.
Kings had a brief spell in the war when boys bright enough to get to Westminster or St. Paul’s were, instead, safeguarded from the Luftwaffe by living on rations and equally lean-picked education in Bruton until they could resume their routes for the Armed Services, investment banking or the Law. Quite a number ended up on the Memorial Board in the school hall.
It is now in the first division for uniform rudeness and pretension.
It seems to spend more on signage, minibuses with logos and trying to make its cricket field look like Newmarket with posts and rails than anything else. No horses, sadly.
Anyway, one of King Charles III’s nieces (is it Eugenie or Beatrice? I can’t tell the toothy, chunky pair apart, the ones who went out for pizza on a strategic occasion) occasionally works for Hauser and Wirth, so Kings can continue to bully the town with Royal impunity.
Visitors, lured by all the promises of vitality, art and designer clothing, are seen every weekend wandering, peering, aimless and lost. Many will stop to ask, ‘I’m sorry, can you point me in the direction of the town?’
‘You have found it already. This is it. The High Street.’
‘You mean…?
‘Yup, all sixty yards of it. The Town.’
‘I thought…’
‘Yes, you all do. The Con gets you all. So sorry for your disappointment.'
‘Is there anything to do here?’
‘Yup. You can gnash your teeth, weep or spend a lot of money while you wait for your train home. Your choice.’
They mostly wander away, past a solitary wonky bowl in a window, in the direction of the station.
I have finally prepared the nest for its piece-de-resistance, the egg of the argument. By now, you will have a better grasp of how easily it will slip in among the addled existing eggs. Hardly noticeable.
Bruton is long oblivious to the unscrupulous and domineering; it rolled over years back.
Let’s head for Life and Death. The devil is what we are after, and the devil is in the detail. It is how he gets away with his malevolence- the administrative banality of evil.
Bruton used to have a GP. One. Jack Taylor operated out of his front room on the High Street, where a naked light bulb burned all day and piles of ten-year-old magazines accumulated since the wait to see him was unpredictable. You turned up and took your place in the queue to have a dressing changed, a surgical procedure, a bowel examination, or a full ECG and sometimes, you would emerge with a prescription. Dr Taylor had no space for any bedside manners, but he was renowned as a perceptive diagnostician, and an emergency appendix would be in an ambulance within minutes. He knew every family in the town, and he worked round the clock seven days a week. He understood genetic pre-disposition and dealt swiftly with whinging, but if you were seriously ill, he was at your bedside. He knew which schoolboys were malingering and which ardent rugby’s cartilage needed to be stalled for longer.
When Taylor agreed to take on a partner, a Dr Genton, superficial things improved. A purpose-built surgery was built, and we got a receptionist and bookings. But Jack Taylor took his exit soon after that. We had gained swish premises but no longer had a doctor who cared about us or knew us. What followed was an increase of people called General Practitioners who wrote prescriptions, and referred even the most insignificant issue elsewhere. Some swift sketches of the passing personnel whose names are indicative:
Our encounters with two of them were nearly always life-threatening.
A Dr Player, well named for a medical card-sharp, a debonair young man was very certain of his importance. He was furious at being called out on a Sunday for a case of flu. Snapping his bag, he departed. Four days later, an ambulance with flashing lights got me to the hospital, and it was very nearly too late. It was meningitis. That happened twice. Both times on a Sunday, and both times, Player tore me off a strip, saying, on the second occasion, ‘Nobody gets meningitis twice’ Again ‘It’s flu’. Because of the delay in treatment, it took months to recover, and I lost much of my eyesight. Once you have had meningitis, you recognize a headache like no other.
His dismissal the second time was not unlike telling an experienced mother in labour that she has wind.
Then there was Dr Chambers, a willowy and seductively soft-spoken woman who fooled us for years. Her dismissals were quite charming. My husband's pins and needles and numbness in his hands were ‘age-related’. He could wait for a referral to the geriatric clinic- in six weeks or so. Only the sudden appearance of a newly qualified young locum, who watched him take five paces and instantly phoned a consultant, saved his life. Tests revealed collapsed vertebrae that were crushing his spinal cord—three years of ignored tingling and numbness had helped. Eight hours under the knife at Frenchay Hospital stabilized further collapse, but the damage was already done. He could no longer walk and was permanently disabled.
The same Dr Chambers, having helped to disable him, also ignored his reports of feeling he was ‘blacking out’. That also was ‘age-related, probably mini-strokes’. She did not take out a stethoscope. The doctor who did, her colleague Dr Gompertz, put it on his chest and simultaneously rang 999. Once in an ambulance, his heart tachycardia was so severe the ambulance broke all previous records to save him.
The Cardiologist who looked at his printout said he would frame it because nobody would believe anyone with that could survive.
He was on the point of death and only just saved in the cardiac ICU for two weeks. Both doctors should have been struck off, but the Primary Care Trust or NHS England did not even acknowledge reports of their negligence.
Gompertz, a meticulous slim practitioner who tapped out your notes during the allotted ten minutes, was reminiscent of Jack Taylor, with the same intuitive recognition of illness or emergency. He kept my husband alive for a further twenty years and visited him at home because he was unable to get into a car. He was on a Skype link to his end. He did not sign the death certificate ‘Covid’, pass ‘go’ or collect £200. Perhaps he collected a conscience instead.
The two of them, doctor and husband (95), departed together, one for the clinic in the sky, the other for pure research. The storm clouds of Covid Central were gathering, and perhaps no doctor worthy of the name wanted to be part of what was coming or guilty of enforced experiments with DNA, not even at £12.75 a jab. So ended the provision of medical care in Bruton, almost synchronously with the end of spiritual care.
Instead, we got— ta-dah! Symphony.
Its performance opens with the clash of cymbals and fanfare under the full throttle of the Covid licence to spray and kill General Practice. First up: the removal of all waiting room chairs, the replacement entrance is now a double door and access by intercom. The patient's toilet is locked. Any patient, pre-screened by telephone as not having COVID, is required to announce his/her arrival by intercom, then wait, ear-to-speaker, outside in the rain until summoned.
I need not pursue those measures further. Everyone encountered much the same. I understand, although I cannot corroborate, that other areas reversed these measures as soon as someone told them that the Plandemic had served its purposes. It had reduced the elderly population by sending them to be Midazo-slammed in care homes. It thanked them for their compliance and paid their substantial Vaccine and Death-by-Covid bonuses.
Not Symphony. Or only superficially. Its receptions are still blocked off by Perspex, plastered with threatening signs. ‘This practice operates a zero-tolerance policy’ It does not define to what it is zero-tolerant, but that takes very little time to discover. Any request to see a doctor has to go via their Central Intelligence Agency called ‘Ask my GP’. Should you telephone a request for an appointment, Reception will put you through their particular CIA. Be assured: if you ask for a particular doctor, he or she will be the last to hear of you. ‘Triage’ will decide.
Only uppity patients imagine they can request a particular doctor.
To get an appointment of any kind, you are required to list your symptoms to anyone who asks and be interrogated on them. Patient Confidentiality is no more. A managerial minion may or may not ring. She will decide how urgent you are and how long you will wait. After four requests to talk to my doctor, I was offered a telephone booking at 8.30 a.m. in two weeks. I am 83. I live alone and had been running a temperature with seizures of uncontrollable shivering for over a week. Her diagnosis was original. ‘You are obviously not that unwell because you talk in complete sentences.’
Let me interpret that for you. ‘You sound coherent, so I probably won’t get away with sending you to a hospital for a DNR or a Nil by Mouth. Not yet.
In two weeks, you may get worse, so I’ll stall for time.’
I am told even aged organs for transplant still turn a penny, not as pretty a penny as a Falun Gong captive in Xinjiang, but worth summat if removed quickly, better still, before death. A heavily sedated patient will not notice. Many haven’t. Perhaps that is why they prohibited all autopsies during Covid? Things might be found missing. Just as hospitals were closed so that nobody would see the empty wards and nurses at their TikTok routines. What wasn’t happening had to be concealed by the conspicuous Nightingale constructions that never housed a patient.
I am still using my corneas and my kidneys, and last time I checked, the rest of me was doing its valiant best.
Back to Symphony’s universal unvarying key, played mezzo forte everywhere. Symphony now has a monopoly and has taken over seventeen surgeries and medical centres in Somerset and Devon. To interpret its practices, you need to keep in mind the indisputable depopulation goals of the NHS. Nobody over seventy merits attention or drugs unless they are Morphine and Midazolam, preferably mixed and tripled. Until then, only statins, antidepressants and other useless drugs attract a premium, and for every repeat, there is £22.00. These elderly useless eaters, averaging about three or four drugs a month, provide perhaps £88.00 per head per month, almost passive income to a practice.
Small wonder that doctors averaging 60-80K need not actually see any patients.
After the departure of the only doctor in Bruton, I transferred to Symphony Millbrook in Castle Cary and was initially hopeful. The surgery had a quintet of doctors, by repute dulcet and benign. But they filtered away in short order, although they were replaced by a published list of twelve on their website, only one or two of whom (the same one or two) were ever on duty, perhaps for half a day. One cannot but wonder what bonuses are paid for all these non-active, invisible ‘doctors.’? Is ‘clinical experience’ now an affiliation that merely requires being on a list somewhere, for a fee, but never seen? A piece of paper legitimising calling yourself a ‘doctor’ setting sail for the colonies?
If you don’t plan to ever see a patient, why bother learning to examine one?
Because I had, whatever Covid was, very badly in 2020, I took months to recover from what some call 'long Covid', total debilitation, and lack of balance. When you live alone, both are independence-threatening. I asked the first of these Millbrook GPs, Dr Edgar, for a prescription for Ivermectin. He scoffed, "Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic. It does not treat Covid, which is a VIRUS.' Having done months of research on Ivermectin, I knew that COVID-19's viral pedigree was far from certain, it has never been isolated. I also knew that even if it were a virus, Ivermectin had been successfully used to treat other viruses like meningitis. More tellingly, I had been following all the international news on the suppression of Ivermectin precisely because it successfully treats Covid. Those front-line doctors in the States were being cancelled for saying so.
If that had been widely known, phase two of the ‘cull’, the vaccine, could never have been rolled out.
I limited myself to ‘Well, in Uttar Pradesh in India, population 261 million, Ivermectin has markedly reduced infection through prophylactic prescription to everyone, and markedly reduced the severity in anyone who actually gets it.’
His reply? “Well, those Indians are all rife with parasites. No wonder they felt better’!
It is hard to disentangle the arrogance from the ignorance in this statement. Or the racism from ingratitude. Is he unaware that twenty per cent of doctors working in the UK are Indian? Or that India’s expertise makes it a medical tourism country? Or that Indian doctors typically encounter a greater range of diseases than their European counterparts and, therefore have wider diagnostic experience? Or that India leads the world in innovative drug R&D to make generic drugs available cheaply to all?
Or that Uttar Pradesh, almost alone in the world, sought to prevent infection in its entire population instead of imprisoning and shouting at them? People without homes are not so easy to imprison.
None of those. Just ‘Indians are overcrowded, dirty people rife with parasites.’
It was, however, not hard to decide that this was a GP whose judgement and compassion I could never trust again. Instead, I searched in India for Ivermectin and received it efficiently, quickly and cheaply by post and benefitted immediately. It was the start of another branch of my education on the NHS, but that is for another day; this is about its militant wing, Symphony.
The next GP at Millbrook, Dr Murdoch, was distinctly promising. He read and recommended books and research papers and admitted that the Thyroid (my likely problem, hardly functioning, and probably knocked out by Covid) was not covered in medical training. A doctor who admitted he did not know things! Amazing! Not only that, he was engaged in researching metabolic functioning and seemed keen to record my experiments on myself. A doctor working WITH a patient? Never before.
Condescension always, collaboration? Never.
You will, by now, understand why Dr Murdoch looked like a lifeline. When I asked him how long he was due to remain with Symphony Millbrook, I learned he was due to leave, and he told me when. I intended to follow him wherever if local enough. He was due to move to Symphony-Wincanton, but when I checked, they would not confirm whether he was moving there or when. He had left Millbrook, scrubbed from its website, but not started at Wincanton. So, again, I lost what looked like a doctor.
A fortnight after he had left, I wrote to him, care of Millbrook, and marked the letter ‘Personal; - please forward if necessary’ The next day, I was rung up by a Millbrook ‘Health coach, Lorraine Job’ A very apposite appellation! Very much a jobsworth for Symphony’s agenda. She was enquiring about my illness and how I was doing. When I asked how she knew I was ill, she said she was responding to my letter to Dr Murdoch. She had opened a letter marked ‘Personal’ addressed to a doctor who had left her centre two weeks earlier!
I suggested that the letter was marked personal, Would she please forward it to Murdoch? No, she would not. All letters to doctors go through the ‘triage’ of Ask My GP, even an ex-doctor’s ex-patient.
No confidentiality remains.
This trivial detail is important because what it reveals is that medicine is not GP led any longer. They have neither authority nor autonomy. Thirty years ago, hospitals were taken over by Managers who rationed the consultants, saved on the cleaning and shrugged at the spread of MRSA. Now, the same managerial domination has filtered down to untrained administrators at every level of rural and remote satellite practices.
Just as all the doctors complied with the Pandemic restrictions and the enforced vaccines, they are now complying with the baton of Symphony’s orchestration of patient access and confidentiality. Doctors have no way of knowing what they do not get told. Unless they ask. We now know they do not ask and are not interested in knowing—the rewards for ignorance roll in. Many doctors may well believe themselves well-intentioned, and they can continue to believe that for as long as they shelter behind doors only opened to selected compliant patients (under seventy) who voice no questions.
Their good intentions need much restoration after what they have done and are continuing to do. The rich harvest of Covid bonuses has mostly been banked, but there are still gleaners out for the remaining straws. Symphony is still pushing mRNA clot shots; the incentive has increased from £12.58 to £15 a jab. [In America, rewards were even more shameless:
the higher the vax hesitancy in an area, the higher the rate paid- like a golf handicap. Some rose to $100 a shot.]
Symphony generates an average one-star rating (there is no option for zero). That will not worry them. They have been awarded an 'employer recognition silver award', perhaps for absorbing the battalion of applicants that failed their army recruitment hopes. There is a curious uniformity in the front-of-house guards that protect doctors from the perils of a patient. Symphony does not exist to generate satisfaction but subservience. Because they have a monopoly in the area, zero tolerance is easily applied. Displease us, and you will pay for it. I opened my mouth about privacy, so I am now clearly on a distributed list of ‘difficult’ patients who must be refused.
Data protection is also dead.
For the past four years, I have wondered what meaningful contribution I could make to the umbrella over the 'Great Reveal', the systematic elimination of all humanity. I have followed the persecution of eminent doctors, the very few brave enough to speak out (Vernon Coleman, Mike Yeadon, Sucharit Bhakdi, Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Aseem Malhotra and many others) and journalists imprisoned for years, like Assange and Fuellmich (both still in jail) or beaten to death like Gonzalo Lira. The brave undertaker, John O’Looney, was telling us from the outset that there was never a pandemic. He and his undertaker colleagues all turned their fridges off. No seasonal flu, no pandemic- until the vaccine turned them on double time and small coffins for the stillbirths were in short supply. Undertakers knew there was no pandemic, but both they and life insurers knew the moment the vaccine started killing people. John O’Looney alone spoke out about the numbers and showed the white fibrous clots that made embalming difficult.
The doctors and nurses, through their silence, have become heedless, happy criminals in the service of the State, as have the police, the courts and scientific advisors.
Silence pays well.
This sad narrative of less-than-lethal force against one old woman hardly merits the time you took to read it. It is comparatively trivial. But there is a population of perhaps 500+K people in Somerset who have to live or die by it. I suspect the same pattern has been repeated elsewhere. Any group of doctors could change it at a stroke. They have power; only their names perpetuate the charade of medical provision. Without them, the charade collapses. But if they were doctors, they would never have let it happen
GPs in the NHS probably have limited options. They can go ‘private’ and answer the telephone if attached to Bupa or similar in cities
with access to testing and scans, but without that they are impotent, unable to refer or diagnose.
Or they could find the guts to refuse, rescue their reputations and reverse everything.
There are things patients could do, too. They could demand to know when each doctor was on duty, information Symphony no longer posts up, and then turn up and quietly wait. Back to the methods of Jack Taylor. It would paralyze the authority of those martinets at the front desks. Doctors worthy of the name should demand an independent way to check all applications to see them and take control of the so-called front-of-house. Any way of filtering ‘urgent’ from non-urgent should never involve intrusive demands for clinical details by administrative staff. They ennoble this filter, calling it ‘triage’ Instead, it is REDACT, DENY, OBSTRUCT by someone—any anonymous someone on a ‘ triage team’ on shift.
The encirclement of Bruton by the ‘Entitled’ is complete. The strangulation of medical provision by Symphony has finished off what remained: health and life itself. No medical centres outside of Symphony’s monopoly are allowed to accept patients from beyond their own delimited area. We are akin to the Rafah of Somerset’s Gaza, herded into Symphony tents (by the take-overs), and now have no escape. The rich prepared the arena, and Symphony now commands it with rude noise, potentially lethal noise that is silent. Drop into any of Symphony’s centres and see if you can find a patient with an appointment.
But you can buy fillet steak for £95.00. Not sure whether that’s for a slice or a pound. Whatever. The people and places selling it have already taken their (locally sourced) pound of flesh. Many times over.
Do you still want to come to this choicest of places to live?