Things Ain’t What They Used To Be

 

Why is it that drunkenness is regarded as a predatory monster that has crept up on us over the last decade or  so?

My mother vividly recollects the 1970s when she was in nurse training. She remembers accompanying her hard drinking friends to night clubs, resting her head on a beer stained table and falling asleep. She was a cheap date. She found it impossible to keep up with them. I live in a university town and the medical students are renowned for their hard drinking behaviour. But this has always been the case. Nobby’s son is a taxi driver who remembers a time in the early seventies when medical students behaved so disgracefully as a result of inebriation that the local taxi companies refused to carry them. And in our hospitals health care staff: from the consultant to the office cleaner would take any drug they pleased from the medication trolley. There was a nationwide investigation into this and security was tightened. The nurses ran the ward, just like the NCOs run the army.

And it would still be like that now if it were not for those pesky managers.

Tags: Health, Medical school, medicine, nursing