Be healthy and happy: go to the doctors.

THE FRIDAY THING, LIFE AND OTHER BITS: WE should be pleased that staff are happy at NHS Oldham (it used to be called the Primary Care Trust but as this is Oldham nobody knew what it meant and anyway it was much simpler when we just called it the doctors).

GPs, who now earn more than the GDP of some small countries, have every reason to smile, unless of course they are giving you bad news. But what about everyone else?

I can understand laughter at the rear view of those medical gowns that will only cover the smallest and pertest little bottoms and not the saggy sacks of lard that the vast majority of us drag (in extreme cases on trolleys) into the treatment room.

It could be that chief exec Gail Richards has got a new joke book; the laughing gas is piped into the air conditioning or maybe those green leaves at reception really are pot plants and not peace plants after all.

Some 65 per cent of the staff responded to the happiness survey and 84 per cent of those were happy which sounds a good number to me. But what about the 35 per cent of staff who didn’t complete the happiness survey? Maybe they were just too happy to fill in the form or perhaps they used to work in shops and have had all the happiness drained out of them.

You know the type I mean. We’ve all seen them and been served — or more likely not served — by them in the past.

Me? Well, if you only had to work Friday wouldn’t you be happy?

THERE’S rum goings on at Grange School where it is the parents rather than the kids who are revolting (as in kicking up a fuss rather than being smelly).

Apparently 600 people signed a petition demanding better education at the school and claiming courses were fiddled to improve results, the wrong subjects are taught (that’s a view I always had when I was at school. After all what’s the point of algebra or calculus or geography, especially now we have satnavs) and there are too many expulsions.

Not surprisingly the staff have marked the petition none out of 600 and have written on it in big red ink letters SEA MEE NOWE.

There is consolation for the pupils though who, like the rest of us, will never in a million years believe that schooldays are the happiest days of their life. What tosh.

Now if they get a job with NHS Oldham, well . . .


FINAL WORD: Themistokles; now there’s a word you never thought you’d read in the Chronicle and now it’s been in twice. It’s what happens when you ask a brainy academic to write a piece on education. It’s all Greek to me, too.