A Smarter Future

Evening Strumpets,

I never got around to posting the stuff that`s been happening over the past couple of weeks last night, so thanks for your patience, and away we go.

After working in the NHS for 13 years, I was made redundant on the 1st of March due to Public Health Cuts. The Condition Management Programme (of which I was a Practitioner)could only prove qualitatively that it was incredibly effective in improving peoples lives, but the Conservatives want quantitative figures. Try doing that with (predominantly)mental health initiatives.

It has been my pleasure over the past couple of years to work within a team which didn`t adopt an attitude of helping people, more so an attitude of helping people to help themselves. It also encouraged me to develop myself in a professional manner I never dreamt I was capable of.

Here`s the irony. Having spent the last couple of years working in Job Centres helping people to find work, I had to sign on last week. I must be honest, by the time I got to meet face to face with a fellow human, they were quite brilliant, and could not have gone more out of their way to help me, but Christ the amount of gumpf and telephone nonsense I had to go through just to get there was soul destroying. Still, I`ve always said you can`t fake empathy, so as far as I`m concerned it gives me another string to my therapeutic bow; although it`s beginning to resemble a harp these days more than a bow, I think I`ve got enough strings now whoever is guiding my life!

So what next? Well, as much as it pains me to write this, I`m setting up a LTD Company to continue the brilliant work CMP was providing. Yes I know it`s exactly what the Conservatives want (ie private companies sourced out to provide services previously provided by Public Health), but I`ve worked too hard and seen what the principles behind CMP can achieve. To paraphrase Rutger Hauer, if I don`t do this I`m afraid that all CMP achieved will be lost like tears in the rain.

The Company is called "A Smarter Future", and I`m not ashamed to admit provides all the things I provided within CMP, ie Chronic Pain Management, Understanding and Coping with Anxiety, Understanding and Tackling Depression, Sleep Management, Anger Management, Raising Self Esteem and Confidence, and General Activity and Pacing Techniques. Not bad eh? All I need now is a foot in the door.

I`m so busy networking and trying to find ways of funding this project, alongside providing Daddy daycare for my Kids that Posts may be few and far between, but I`ll try and let you all know how I`m getting on, as well as how the Alice Charmers are getting on also.

In the meantime.......

Here`s a couple of presents for the Strumpets.

By far and away the song which gets the most positive reaction from the old live stuff. It`s been posted before, but recorded on a rubbish Mobile.
Hope you like it.



And how good is Grace getting? Look at the different fingers being used!!!



All comments really gratefully received regarding everything, as usual, and why not follow the GNS, you can do it by clicking on the follow icon below followers on the right hand side of the screen underneath "search this blog". I have nearly ten thousand page views, and fourteen followers!

Till the next one, learn something new,

Mark.