AS with most things on this planet, the guy at the bottom of the pile gets the worse deal.

This week I had to visit the local hospital. I have nothing against any of the staff as I feel it is the system that will kill us all first.

A simple visit to the emergency rooms begins by them charging that horrible £1.90 to park your car. It is not the £1.90 that matters (actually, it does a little) but the fact that they put the sign underneath stating ‘No change will be given.’ This ‘No change will be given’ sign is basically a way of sticking two fingers up at you.

If, for any reason, you don’t have ninety pence in change, the machine takes your ten pence. I know I was fasting at the time but this got me into a bad mood.

As you have figured out, I did not have the change so had to pay the extra ten pence.

Maybe it is because I am of a Pakistani background. Maybe I am from Lancashire. Or maybe I just don’t like getting done over by a machine…but I could not stop thinking about that ten pence.

The emergency room’s other great idea is to make people even more irate by ensuring we don’t have any signal on our phones.

So, if we have to wait the customary three hours we are unable to scroll through the phone and read something of interest.

Instead we have to figure out other ways to ‘kill’ the time.

Barring that, the whole visit went pretty well. The staff were very efficient and they managed to cut my hand out from the parking meter pretty quickly.

  • AS some of you may be aware, this week marks the end of Ramadhan and the return to some sort of normality.

I sense that today people will be doing what we all do after any major festival – try to figure out what to do with all the leftover food.