Letters - September 11, 2017

I note there are efforts to help left-handed children in learning to write.

However, as a left-hander myself, I think it is very important that not too 
much emphasis is placed on this.

Left-handers will, throughout their lives, have to get used to living in a right-handed world.

There is no help on a day-to-day basis.

If children grow up thinking there is, they will be sadly mistaken.

Writing in English itself is right-handed.

If you are left-handed, you have to push a pen rather than pull, and you can’t see what you have just written.

Books are right-handed.

Cheque books (remember them?) were particularly difficult.

A wired computer mouse is set on the right.

Scissors, tin openers and potato peelers are right-handed.

Yes, you can buy left-handed versions but they are expensive and not always available to you.

ATMs are right-handed.

The only thing I can think of that is left-handed is the gear lever and hand brake in a right-hand drive car.

The righties are even designing these out.

I could go on, but please don’t treat left-handed children as having a disability because, as they grow older, they will have to get used to a right-handed world.

David Collins

Address 
supplied

‘ANGRY BIRDS’

It’s the pigeons... not the seagulls!

I read a letter in The Gazette a few weeks ago, grumbling about the seagulls in town taking food from people!

Well that’s not true, because all the time I’ve been in town shopping, the surly ones who come down are pigeons, unless we threw something tasty down then they come.

Seagulls are the seaside! After all we took all the fish out of the sea. They can’t get their food now, unless something has washed up on the shore for them to eat, it’s from us, the dumps, take-away food or a kind person feeding them at the ponds etc.

I wake up in the morning by their calls, which I like to hear.

Also the person who wrote complaining about them also complained about the B&B he’d been in. I’m glad he left Blackpool - not the kind of visitor we want here. Good luck in all you write about, I am a keen reader of the Gazette.

Ms M Stewart

St Annes

WAR

Korean concern

The situation in North Korea is very worrying and the matter is almost insolvable due to the nature of both Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump.

Kim well knows that if he is attacked by the US, China will enter the fray on his side, so he is behaving like a naughty schoolboy who knows he cannot be punished.

The blustering Trump has been snookered by China’s attitude. The only thing that concerns me personally is that Theresa May will allow us to be drawn into any conflict between the US and North Korea.

Peter Hyde

Address supplied

HEALTH

NHS plan you have never heard of...

Since the Tory government came to power, problems within the NHS have been constant.

Winter and summer crisis and recently A&Es closing their doors, with ambulances unable to discharge their patients.

Now the chief Executive of NHS England (with support from the Health Minister Jeremy Hunt) has created a plan to solve this by closing more A&Es. The rationale is; closing more hospitals deters people from using them!

Jeremy Hunt hired Simon Stevens to take over NHS England in 2014. Before that he was president of global operations for United Health of America where he was a lobbyist for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. In post here he has contrived to open up public health services in our NHS to US private health corporations.

More reorganisation comes in ‘Sustainability and Transformation Plans’. He has split the country into 44 areas - called ‘footprints’. Each ‘footprint’ clinical commissioning group (CCG) was told last year that they must have a plan by September 30 this year to completely change the way the NHS works. To work, CCGs have to prove they can clear their massive debts within a year. To do this they may have to close services and sell NHS land and hospitals.

Lancashire will be twinned with South Cumbria, which in itself creates an uneven playing field, between two regions so diverse, between affluence and poverty. In Blackpool we are prone to bad housing which in itself is a catalyst for poor health; also for drug and alcohol related issues. South Cumbria has fewer of these problems.

Together with recruitment and retention issues, low pay and financial shortfalls among other restraints, the amalgamation of CCG areas will be a huge challenge for the new eight combined areas meant to improve services at the same time.

One positive from the amalgamation is that Victoria hospital will be saved from closure along with The Health Centre.

More re-organisation is ongoing though, so watch this space!

Marjorie Nye

Knowle Avenue
Blackpool 
on behalf of 38 degrees save our NHS campaign.