A journey of a thousand miles begins from the spot under one’s feet.
–Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Two of the lollipop men NHS grunts most love to hate put their heads above the parapet recently. The anti-GM crop man who is himself part of a GM crop said doctors had lost the human touch, and must in future care more. The minister whose brains if extracted and compacted would make a passable mothball fumed about the normalisation of cruelty in the NHS. The familiar vistas of patients managed like battery hens, caged in their beds and kept in the dark, were rolled out across the media. A picture was conjured of the NHS as a giant sausage machine, taking live patients in at one end, and extruding a grotesque string of body-bags at the other. In between, moths of death flit in and out of the shadows, undaunted by ministerial mothballs. If the NHS, by these accounts, can be summed up in one word, it is Hades, realm of the eponymous Lord of the Underworld, a dark realm which all may enter, but none may leave.
"Those who, in the confidence of superior capacities or attainments, neglect the common maxims of life, should be reminded that nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity, long continued, will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible."
Millipede, Master of the Trivial Pursuit, continued his chase of the ineffable at PMQs earlier this week. He posed vexing questions, one after the other. Or maybe he vexed, posing questions. No one was quite sure. The PM was riled, having just been told to shut it by the speaker, and had no intention whatsoever of playing Mornington Crescent – by Stott’s Fifth Ammendment rules or any other for that matter – with the Right Hon. Gent. for Doncaster North. Instead, the PM had about him the air of a man who wanted to shoot something, preferably something with horns on it, like the Hon. Gent. opposite, but tiresomely had shot his gillie, or maybe it was his wife, instead. 
The Hospital Manager’s Association
The Orwellian coup of calling the corporate bodies that run the NHS ‘trusts’ – with the comforting overtones of propriety and trustworthiness - hides the fact that underneath the surface they are like any other corporation: selfish, secretive and 
Hierachiology – the “-ology” that studies hierarchies – was founded by Dr Laurence J Peter, who also gave his name to the eponymous Peter Principle: that, in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence.