The Grumpy Old Blog

  Headed off to A&E at Bolton with a stomach ulcer (to be confirmed, although medical staff suspected same from the "tarry" state of my presented human remains, delicately gift-wrapped in a ZipLok bag) at 7.45 Monday, c/o phone call with emergency doctor telling me to go immediately to hospital, not to pass "Go" and not to collect £200. Had bloods taken at 22:45. Enjoyed night sitting and dozing on wonderful, haemorrhoid-inducing metal chair in A&E with some 45 other overly-patient patients. Gentleman arrived writhing in pain from a kidney stone at 12.30am and was allowed to comfortably writhe on the floor for 40 min before someone was free from clearing up from the gang warfare that people with nice clean knife wounds and their police "observers" were causing. Gentleman with obvious issues wandering around the ward at 2.45am in a silver preservation blanket doing his impression of Father Jack from "Father Ted" ("Drink, drink, feck, ...

Recruitment in the UK has become an ugly beast. Companies are increasingly caught up in inefficient, amateur and downright unethical practices that are driven by HR nonsense imported from the USA. And unfortunately, successive governments haven't had the gumption to do something about it, where it has got to the stage that legislation is long overdue. HR, often called "Human Remains" by increasingly cynical and mistrusting staff, has now become the laughing stock of business practices, often the crutch used by limping CEO's and MD's who are too weak to either do the hiring and firing themselves, or do anything constructive about it. Now I don't for one minute deny that there are some good personnel people out there! Unfortunately, they are overshadowed by the clinically useless and mechanically inept - those who make more noise, create more misery and frankly, exist for no other reason than they have a little more knowledge on the subject than their peers. The...

With the impending publication of the Sunday Times annual "Rich List", it will be interesting to see the mix of people who achieve a listing. No doubt it will be all the usual suspects - the retailers "gone large", the entertainers, the inheritors, the lottery winners, the surviving dot com entrepreneurs and those who gain their millions at tax-payers expense while attracting the interest of the researchers at Private Eye! It is fair to say that most deserve the accolade. Yes, there may have been an element of some being in the right place at the right time, but most have maintained their position through hard work, with the added bonus of employing hundreds of thousands of British workers between them. People like Sir James Dyson with his wonderful, great British inventions, Sir Philip Green, maybe not at times the most popular guy in the UK, but nevertheless one of those whose empire employs thousands, Emma Watson the Harry Potter actress who has brought joy...