Dentists, and Wembley, fekkwittery at its best

My dentist has written to us to inform us that he will not be signing the new NHS dentists contract tomorrow and that we will therefore have to pay for the portion of the treatment that we receive from him that was previously covered by the NHS.

Which simply means that our two children will no longer receive free treatment, for many years now he has charged "private" rates for adults (hence my recent £720 bill for a new crown) but he has treated the under 16's and students on the NHS contract - we now have to pay for our daughters treatment too although as a goodwill gesture he is doing their six monthly check-ups free of charge instead of charging £25 each.

Listening to Radio Leeds this morning this seems to be due to local administrators insisting that dentists have to treat all patients on the NHS or non at all, Leeds are insisting on this while Bradford allow "mixed use" of private and NHS patients in the same way that our dentist has been doing up until now.

Its not a huge problem to us, we are not fabulously wealthy but can at least afford the more simple dental treatments for our daughters, although god knows what the proposed dental brace for Jodie is going to cost later this year, but many people simply cannot afford to pay for dental treatment and are struggling to find a dentist at all within the city who will treat them.

The UK is apparently the fourth wealthiest country in the world, we are supposed to receive free medical and dental treatment on the NHS funded by taxation - it doesn't seem to be working.

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and then there is Wembley.

The (supposedly) national stadium of the England football team, the old Wembley was iconic but a shitheap, difficult to get to, difficult to get away from, anyone who never went does not understand that the terracing and stairwells could be rivers of piss by full time at any match due to the lack of and access to any sort of reasonable toilet facilities, the seats that had been hurridly installed sometime in the 1980's were narrow and uncomfortable and the cheapest of the seats were nothing more than parrot perches that you squatted on while obtaining deep vein thrombosis - the old Wembley needed replacing.

And then the politicians got involved. The English Football association asked for public money to help finance a new stadium, the government agreed in principal but insisted that the stadium should be used for other sports as well as football, including athletics, which sort of ballsed-up the plans that had already been approved as there wasn't room for an athletics track and there was a legitimate debate that football fans didn't want to sit in a stadium where you were 40 yards away from the pitch because of a running track.

The debate raged, not for months but for years and while it raged the costs spiralled - its what happens when you involve politicians in any sort of project. If the FA had appointed a design and build contractor right at the start then we would have had our national stadium built on time and within budget several years ago, as it stands now the opening date gets more and more flexible as each week progresses and the progress on site seems to get slower and slower as each week progresses - the main contractor is blaming the massive disruption at the start of the contract for the majority of the delay, mainly because the plans for the build changed on a daily basis as one politician after another put his oar into the works on behalf of his own political agenda.

The completion date of May this year has now been revised to "2007", just sometime in 2007, its OK lads, just hand it over when you think its ready, we'll wait for it. Oh and by the way, it would have been better in Birmingham, the new Wembley is just as inaccessable as the old Wembley, what with it being built ont he same site and all, but thats another story.