Apparently the FSA was quoted as saying that they thought that selling milk from cloned cows or their offspring was illegal. So even the FSA aren’t sure on the exact details of the law! The FSA are now investigating the claim made by a dairy farmer who wishes to remain anonymous.

It was only recently that the European Parliament decided to ban selling meat and diary produce that has come from clones. Although the decision has yet to become an actual law, hence the confusion as to what exactly the FSA should be investigating.

While no one is quite sure on the effect of produce made from cloned cows there are health concerns for the cloned animals themselves. Research has shown that animals born by way of the cloning process have slightly higher rates of deformities and premature births. But not to worry because an FSA spokesman was quoted as saying: “Based on the best available evidence, there are no food safety concerns surrounding consumption of products from healthy clones or their offspring.”

To be honest I never knew that food from cloned cows was being produced. I had always been under the impression that cloning was a one off test that everyone made a big fuss about when dolly the sheep was cloned way back. The fact that food from cloned animals wasn’t even considered by law until recently makes me think we’re all going to be ok.

So I’m going to keep drinking milk, eating beef and wearing urban clothing.

1. Home repossessions are set to skyrocket in the UK. Although interest rates are being kept low, helping to reduce monthly mortgage repayments, for many this will still be too much as other bills are on the increase and many are losing their jobs.
2. Unemployment in the UK will rise significantly. If we aren’t already above the 2 million mark we soon will be – and it’s going to get a lot worse as more businesses, big and small, bite the dust.
3. Our focus on the economy will draw attention away from imperative climatic issues. There’s no denying that our climate is changing – rapidly. This is not the time to be taking our eye off the environment.
4. Gordon Brown is set for the most miserable year of his life. His popularity will continue to dwindle but he’s likely to resist calls for a general election.
5. There’s likely to be an awful, senseless terrorist attack somewhere in the world. This one is almost a’given’ these days. It really is a sad and dangerous world we have made for ourselves and somewhere some poor, innocent people will find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
6. There’s also a good chance of a major natural disaster somewhere. Maybe a landslide in the Canary Islands, a massive earthquake or volcanic eruption. In many parts of the world people are living on borrowed time. Too many in geographically vulnerable locations that are basically time bombs waiting to go off.
7. A religious leader, political leader or well known personality will be attacked. While it can be argued that there are a few people in positions of responsibility or prominence who could do with a kick up the backside, nobody deserves to be attacked.
8. World climate will be found to be changing more quickly than had been estimated. There is no denying the climate change that is taking place but it will become clear that the rate of change is accelerating and that disaster is just around the corner.
9. Economic problems will encourage many to look at communism as an alternative. Failure of world economies will result in lots of people questioning the systems that they have grown up with. Alternatives like communism are likely to become popular.
10. Civil unrest and riots will fill the news. Whenever you turn on the TV news or listen to the radio there will be a new report of riots, looting and upheaval somewhere in the world. Poverty and hunger will spread and vast numbers of people will die due to malnutrition.

So there you are. Ten miserable predictions for this forthcoming year. Maybe these are not too optimistic but I think we’re going to find that they are painfully accurate. Many will need to find a second income just to make ends meet and lots of people will lose their houses and their livelihoods in as our economic crisis bites ever deeper.

Even though The Nurse is banged up, she’s still environmentally aware.

Tapping away on her keyboard late into the night, The Nurse has been trying to identify the single most effective thing she can do to help the environment.

OK, so she can’t do much from in here. HMP XXX isn’t exactly stuffed with consumer goods and packaging ripe for recycling. She isn’t given enough food to dream of wasting any. She has no lightbulbs. Her carbon footprint – stuck as she is in a cold, dank eight by four foot cell -must be tiny.

Several weeks into her research The Nurse came across this week’s edition of New Scientist magazine. Always a good way to get to the crux of any scientific, economic, cultural or social matter.

The Nurse would be hard pressed to express things better than New Scientists’s journalists. So she won’t bother. Here it is verbatim, straight from the horse’s mouth:

Q: What is the single most effective thing I can do for the environment?

A: Over a 75 year lifespan, the average European will be responsible for about 900 tonnes of CO2 emissions. For Americans and Australians, the figure is more like 1500 tonnes. Add to that all of humanity’s other environmentally damaging activities and, draconian as it may sound, the answer must surely be to avoid reproducing.

It will come as no surprise that The Nurse seldom has occasion to be smug. No chance of parole, surrounded by nutters, forgotten most of the time, half starved and constantly fighting chronic boredom. Her life’s hardly a picnic.

But, unwittingly, she has found herself rocketed to dizzying heights of morality. The Nurse doesn’t have children. She is child free and, as such, has managed to achieve the single most effective way to help the environment known to man.

The Nurse has given the world a precious gift. She wonders whether, if they knew, they’d forgive her and let her out.

TV in prison isn’t always a benefit.

More things that make The Nurse very, very cross. And that’s not a nice thing to see.     

1. Ireland versus Zimbabwe. Is The Nurse the only one to see parallels between Mugabe ignoring the civil and human rights of his countrymen and European bosses ignoring Ireland’s clear refusal of the EU Treaty? The Nurse is nigh on speechless at the irony. And at the sheer cheek of it.

2. What’s going on with the media and science?  The Nurse likes to read New Scientist. Sod womens’ magazines. She wonders why some of the amazingly good news reported in New Scientist never reaches the TV or mainstream media. All they report is doom, gloom, contradictory stories, scare mongering and junk science.

3.  Women, know your place. The Nurse is grinning while typing this… golly, she’s going to make some blood boil! She argues that women who want everything are asking for trouble. It is clearly almost impossible to cope with a job, a bloke, a house and kids. So just accept that you can have kids or a job. Not both. And if you insist on making such a rod for your back, stop moaning that you can’t cope.

4. Tracy Emmin, kindly fuck off! Back in the olden days The Nurse went to Brighton College of Art and Design, and left proudly clutching one BA Hons degree. So the antics of Ms Emmin just piss her off. Enormously. On one hand you have Picasso, who could draw like an angel. A technical genius who learned his craft painstakingly before abstracting his way into totally new territory with courage, vision and wisdom. And on the other hand you have Tracy Emmin.  Enough said. Words fail The Nurse. Although the advice ‘fuck off and grow up’ comes to mind.

5. What is art? The Nurse would like to propose a new sub-category called ’Experiential’ art. Damien Hurst, Tracy Emmin and the rest of the shock merchants would neatly fall into this new category, preserving the term ‘art’ for sculptors and painters

Shite. The Nurse’s biro has run out and try as she might, it’d take a better man than her to make a mark on Izal loo paper with a pencil.  Stuff the news, anyway. She lies on her bunk and thinks about the old days instead.  Meeting Lecter in Bogata. Lunch with Gilmore and sharing cake with the charming Mr Dahmer.  While she doesn’t really miss being outside, freedom had its compensations…      

This week’s list covers a slew of issues that appear, to one incarcerated for so long, frankly crazed.  When The Nurse was last at liberty, smelling the sky and letting the sun fall on her scarred cheeks, the world was a simpler and more logical place. But then again she has been mouldering here for a very, very long time. 

Things that make The Nurse’s blood boil 

1. Why isn’t Iraq allowed to have nuclear weapons when America, the UK and most of the developed world have them, with no intention of ditching them? There’s no logic.

2. Why is everyone getting so het up about the housing ‘market’? When The Nurse was young and free there wasn’t a housing ‘market’. A house was a home, not an investment. You decorated and extended it to your taste and needs, not to please prospective buyers. You bought a house to live and love in, not to make a fast buck.

3. Why’s everyone wittering on about how terrible children are these days? When The Nurse was young she knew boys who blew up empty buildings with home made explosives (sugar and fertiliser), broke into the local post office, fired dirty great rocket fireworks at passing buses, threw darts at each oter, wielded deadly home made catapults and smashed every pane in their neighbours’ greenhouses. That was back in the 60s and 70s. The difference in 2008? The Nurse thinks it might be a matter of understanding common sense barriers: in the noughties the kids are carrying knives. And nobody has told them not to stamp on people’s heads. Perhaps that’s one of the things a kid needs a dad for? Think on, wilfully single mums.

4. Why does the Government seek (and pay a massive amount of our tax money for) expert advice then ignore it? The Nurse feels Brown et al are displaying the most crass, foul and disgraceful arrogance by believing they know best. Cannabis, for instance. The facts state that there has been absolutely NO discernable increase in psychotic episodes and illnesses as a result of cannabis or anything else. Or so the experts say. But what do the experts know, eh Gordon?

5.  Why are people getting so pissed? The whole country’s rat arsed. The Nurse occasionally finds slightly tiddly, happy people fun to be with. But drunk people are boring, stupid, ugly, alarming, repetitive and maudlin.   

6. Why is everyone hell bent on saving ‘the planet’ when the planet will be absolutely fine, whatever we do or don’t do? It is actually our own miserable, greedy, polluting skins we’re trying to save. Without us, our beautiful blue planet will remain beautiful and blue, spinning serenely through eternity. With us, it is turning into a shithole pretty fast. It would be honourable to acknowledge this rather than pretending to be altruistic. 

7. Why has it taken so long for people to start taking notice of the potential for worldwide fuel crises? The Nurse remembers being taught, back in the early 1970s, that we’d run out of oil by about 2020.  We’ve known about this shit for a long time. But have we done anything? Have we ****!  

8. Why is everyone ignoring the fact that human survival is doubtful as long as our population keeps growing? The Nurse imagines any discussion would be horribly non PC. But there’s a really nasty dichotomy between working to save human lives and the sheer unsustainable numbers of us. Perhaps it is too scary to think about. 

9. Why can people buy cars that are capable of going way over the speed limit? What’s the point? It’s common sense that if a car lets a person drive fast, a percentage of people will drive like buffoons. Why not stop the problem altogether by making cars that go a maximum of 80mph. That leaves drivers an extra 10mph emergency speed if they’re travelling at 70mph, the legal maximum. Why does anyone need more speed?

10. Why don’t kids play out any more? The Nurse enjoyed years of total freedom as a child, leaving home at dawn and home at dusk for tea, filthy with adventures. Self confident and brave with skinned knees. Chased by skin heads, falling off walls and tying little brothers to lamp posts. Ranging far and wide. The Nurse thinks she knows why… it’s mostly because of cars. Oh dear, what an appalling petard we’ve hoist ourselves upon. Rather than giving us freedom, the car is responsible for the loss of many precious personal libereties. Basic stuff like the freedom to walk and breathe safely. Sometimes the freedom to walk at all. Try crossing the Warren roundabout in Worthing on foot. You’ll be lucky to survive.   

Mohammed

Fully aware of the risk of having a fatwa raised against her, The Nurse has spent the morning wrenching back common sense from the hands of the nutters. Mainly by re-naming things.

The prison cat, previously named Little Baby Jesus by the inmates, has been re-named Mohammed. Each inmate has signed an agreement to change their christian name to Mohammed (causing some confusion, soon remedied with a cunning alpha numeric sub-classification system).  The screws (wardens, to foreign visitors unfamiliar with Her Majesty’s slang)  are all wearing new name badges: ‘Burly’ Brian Mohammed, Ted Mohammed, Shirl Mohammed and Mr Jones Mohammed. Last but not least Mohammed Mohammed, the prison’s IT Manager, has changed his first and surnames, by deed poll, to ‘Christ’. He’s Moslem.

None of which will make a blind bit of difference to the silliness going on abroad. But it makes The Nurse (AKA The Blessed Virgin Mary) feel marginally better. Almost as though she’s regained some good, old fashioned freedom of speech for the world. A feeble last gasp of rebellion in favour of a far-off Utopia where she could’ve called her teddy bear ‘Hitler’ without anyone being particularly bothered. A place where you weren’t hung, drawn and quartered for naming your school hamster ’Jehova’. A place where The Nurse could run, wild and free, with the metaphorical wind of eloquence running unrestricted through her hair…

In the hope that lots of bouncy, fertile young females and hormone-tortured males’ll read this post, The Nurse feels duty bound to point out the top five benefits of remaining child-free. If you’re currently considering dropping a sprog make yourself a coffee, sit down and read on…

5. pelvic floor hell: your pelvic floor muscles will probably go to shite when you give birth. This means, in addition to the risk of pregancy-related piles, you’ll be farting like a sailor, leaking urine and wearing incontinence pants. So if you want to keep ‘em tight, say no to los bambinos.

4. loads of free time: It only takes one child to eat up all of your spare time.  Every second of it. In effect, you put everthing except the child on hold for at least eighteen years. Life’s very short. To be healthy, your spirit needs time and space and peace to reflect. Uness you really want to spend a great chunk of life running yourself ragged without a second to stop and stare, reconsider becoming a parent.

3. freedom of speech and action: The minute a child comes into the room, bang goes adult fun and stimulating conversation. Children, apparently, need to be protected from all sorts of things and once you’ve got one, you lose a whole load of adult rights and privileges. The right to smoke, swear, take the occasional toke, get mildly squiffy, mention sex, war or death… the list is depressingly long. If you love the freedom of being a grown up, stay child free.

2. money:  If you can bear the thought of working your backside raw for twenty years only to spend it all on a spectacularly ungrateful little Dwayne or Kylie, go ahead and procreate. But if you prefer to travel, buy lovely things, live and sleep well, look younger, have fewer or no worries and pay off your mortgage in a fraction of the time, try the no-child route.

1. The best years of your life: “There are loads of things I wanted to do, but then the kids came along” is a familiar cry. As is, “I love them to bits and I wouldn’t be without them now. But if I’d known how hard it was, I’d have thought twice about having them”. It’s fine to use up the best, most active, fittest and productive years of your life looking after kids. As long as you realise what you’ll be sacrificing. You can park your life on the sideline until they leave home. But you might get run over by a bus tommorrow, mightn’t you? Then you’d be sorry.

If The Nurse has made even one lust-stricken teenaged couple or forty-something first timer think again about bringing yet another child into an overcrowded world, she’ll consider her job done. 

Millions of ordinary law-abiding folk hold down jobs, pay massive mortgages and rear nice, polite children. But at weekends they indulge in a marvellous array of class A and B drugs to no ill effect. It’s only the addicts – the abusers – that cause problems. Nor are these happy Weekend Warriors throwing up Phal on the street, showing their tits to passers by, falling down, stealing or fighting. That’s the binge drinkers. So The Nurse felt his recommendation made sense.

Old habits die hard. Retrieving her laboratory test log book and special pen from their hiding place under her toilet bucket, The Nurse decided to test the theory. Her plan: to offer unlimited prison moonshine to half her fellow inmates (thus simulating an all night Stella-scarfing session) while giving the other half free access to a generous pile of ecstasy pills.

Both segments were given basic instruction about how to consume the stimulants with maximum safety:

• drinkers – don’t drink too much. Stop before you get drunk. Alternate with water if it’s a long night

• drug users – don’t drink water unless you’re dancing. If you’re dancing, drink water

The results:

DRINKERS – eight hours after the experiment began The Nurse observed the drinkers, all too drunk to remember the ’stop before you get drunk’ safety guideline. This segment was variously breaking knives out of the prison kitchen, hanging the guards, vomiting in each others’ beds and engaging in unfortunate ‘beer goggle’ fuelled incidents (too raw to detail). Arguing irrationally with their best friends. Texting out for extra large kebabs. Smashing up the television room, bleeding, roaring karaoke and calling each other cunts. In all, the drink made inmates boring, ugly and stupid. Or more boring, ugly and stupid.

DRUGGIES – eight hours in The Nurse observed the pilled-up segment sensibly abiding by the safety guidelines despite having decimated the huge pile of doo-dahs. They appeared busy and productive: holding impromptu therapy sessions, talking about their childhoods, making new friends, sitting in the exercise yard marvelling at the night sky, holding hands with the screws and cleaning their cells. A group had pushed back the tables and set up a mini-rave in the dining hall. The most serious effects appeared to be excessive gurning and the loss of an occasional conversational thread.

The Nurse acknowledges that addicts have a terrible time of it. They deserve to have lots of money spent on them to help them get better. But happy, harmless drug users should be left to get on with it. They cause no harm to society and very little to themselves. Alcohol seems to be the only fart at the Bar Mitzvah and it’s a particularly stinky one.

To complete her research, The Nurse went in search of statistics. In London alone, during 2000, alcohol-related property and social damage cost the taxpayer an horrific £4.6 billion (www.number10.gov.uk). No doubt it will be a lot more in 2007, with binge drinking still on the up. But she couldn’t find any stats for ecstasy-related damage. Nada.

Alcoholol related deaths in the UK during 2005 numbered 8,386 (www.statistics.gov.uk). Again, this has probably increased significantly since then. Whereas on average there are 40 UK ecstasy-related deaths per year and just 26 reported across the whole of Europe during ‘04 (www.guardian.co.uk).

The Nurse’s conclusions are based on the premise that there’s no valid moral argument against taking drugs, per se. After all, what’s morally wrong with feeling good? Common sense shows that while deaths by drug abuse are tragic, humans have always liked to take stimulants and they always will. The Nurse’s point relates to the relative dangers and social costs of Es – and similar – versus booze.

As such, the statistics speak for themselves. The Nurse rests her case.

Our roving, festival going reporter told us that the figure was probably higher than this, and it doesn’t actually reflect the value of the money and other items that were stolen. We’ve heard of one individual who had £800 nicked from their tent and another who had £350, a camera and a nice pair of Nike trainers pinched.

Crime at festivals is nothing new, just look at all the drug dealing! But thieving on this scale is a worrying development. Festival goers are, after all, a soft touch. The big chill attracts people with a few bob in their pockets, taking time out from their high powered jobs to indulge themselves in some hedonistic revelry for a few days. To record the event they take along their fancy cameras and they’ll have their new mobile phones, some nice posing clobber and a big wad of cash to pay the drug dealers for the weekend’s medication. It’s therefore not surprising that some organised criminals are targeting these gatherings.

What is more worrying are the reports that we have received regarding the role that certain security staff played in the burglaries that were carried out this year. We have received uncorroborated reports that some security staff were, in fact, briefing the criminal gangs regarding which fields of tents they should target. We were not particularly surprised by this as we have several contacts who work in the security industry who are all steroid-noshing bad boys who will do almost anything for a few bob. That’s not to say that everyone working in security is open to corruption or engaged in illegal activity. Like any profession there are bound to be a few people who don’t play by the rules, and when the compensation for a little information is sufficiently high anybody would be tempted.

But what can the average festival goer do to protect themselves? Out top tips are:

1. Don’t take anything with you that you would hate to lose because even if you don’t get it nicked you’ll probably leave it somewhere when you are spannered;
2. Challenge anybody who doesn’t have the required wristband or ID. Don’t worry about making a noise or a fuss, shout at them if necessary;
3. Make sure you know what the security guards are actually wearing and what their IDs look like;
4. Make use of any on-site security facilities for those expensive items you just couldn’t leave at home;
5. Take as little cash with you as possible and make use of on-site cash dispensing facilities;
6. Stash your cash down your drawers. You’d have to be seriously out of it not to notice someone groping around your genitals looking for your wonga;
7. Find out what security measures are in place before you go along and make sure you are happy with them. If you are not then say so.
8. Stay at home.

If you’d like to read some varied reports regarding this years Big Chill I can recommend this thread: Festival Forum: The Big Chill.

We’ll be trying to bring you reports from our club activities along with comment from our resident anaesthetist, The Gasman, and our practice nurse known simply and respectfully as The Nurse.