Burgers, Bullies, and Budapest

It's been a busy busy week. Some aspects of which I have enjoyed enormously and others which have been an absolute nightmare.

My mother seems to have picked up. A combination of a change in medication and several visits to hospital seems to have done the trick.

I'm not going into all the details here because it will become boring, but suffice it to say we have had some truly horrendous experiences. Not in terms of the care we received, but in the way that care is managed and all the cliches that it's the managers in the NHS who are ruining things sadly would seem to be true.

I'm not afraid of speaking up for myself and I'm certainly not afraid of speaking up on behalf of my mother, loudly and forcibly when necessary. I've had to do this on too many occasions. It becomes boring to me. I've spoken to directors of social services, directors of adult care, social workers, directors and social workers who don't turn up, directors of negligent social workers and it's ridiculous. There are some people who don't have anyone to speak up on their behalf. I don't know how they manage. The system probably just allows them to fall by the wayside and that is deplorable. We've reached a halfway satisfactory conclusion as far as my mother is concerned. A conclusion that I'm sure will be reviewed at the first possible opportunity, and one that I'm sure I will have to fight for again. At the moment the social services have acceded some responsibility for her care and that is how we are proceeding at least until the beginning of 2012. We only got there by a fight. Indeed I have to go so far as to say by some outright bullying, but it seems to be the only language these people understand. They hide behind petty bureaucracy. They hide behind the fact that they spend most of their day relating to a computer screen rather than to people. They hide.

This Thursday the 24th my Mum celebrates her 90th birthday. There have been times over the past month when I didn't think she'd make it, so the celebration will be all the more poignant and joyous for it. Thanks to everyone who sent kind messages enquiring about her health.

The last 12 days have been occupied with conferences on the work front. One of my major clients in the conference world is McDonald's UK and I've just directed a conference for them at Excel in London for over 2000 people. It wasn't without its headaches as no project of that size is, but I do have the joy of working with a team of people who are brilliantly creative and manage to come up trumps no matter what is thrown at them.

Today I've been with some of the same team in a hotel in Leicester putting on a much smaller conference which will happen tomorrow for about 150 people. Yet funnily enough the problems seem no smaller. We had a very long day dealing with all sorts of things and yet we've got there.

The tiny three-day gap between the end of the large conference and this morning was filled by a rather wonderful trip to Budapest. The last time I went to Budapest it was a stop on a six-week Shakespeare tour which was my first ever job as an actor way back in 1978. It came at the end of our tour and I have absolutely no memory of it whatsoever, so it was great to find a chance to reacquaint myself with what is a rather beautiful city. A friend of ours Martin is working out there for a couple of weeks, so his partner Sam who was heading over the weekend invited Richard and I to join them and we had an absolutely fabulous time. They are great people to be with, good easy company and up for fun.

Sightseeing bus tours, river trips in subzero temperatures after dark, a fabulous trip to the thermal spa, and good meals and conversation. We arrived back late last night tired but fulfilled  - our suitcase just a little more packed than it had been when we left and yet glad to be home.

Wednesday of this week will see me have my first full day at home for about three weeks. I'm so looking forward to it. As they say "no matter where you wander, there's no place like………….."

How true.