Mike Priestley: North of Watford

It has seemed like that many times throughout this century. It must have seemed like it to the Edwardians as the storm clouds gathered before 1914. It must have seemed like it to the inter-war generation passing through the Depression of the 1930s while Hitler flexed his muscles.

And it has seemed like that to my post-war generation ever since the first mushroom cloud rose up and blotted out the sun. It has never been the sort of world to encourage long-term planning. There has always appeared to be a strong likelihood that we would soon be paying the price for mankind's monstrous follies. We have lived with dread, and learned to cope with it.

There was a brief brightening when the Cold War ended. But it's all been downhill from there. The men who were once the two most powerful on the planet, the presidents of the US and Russia, have been holding a "summit" this week - a pathetic double act, one made a laughing stock by his lies and his sexual appetite, the other an alcoholic whose fellow countrymen can't wait to consign him to a vodka haze of oblivion.

When their two countries were officially sworn enemies, we worried but at least we knew where we stood. Each country had a structure, a philosophy and a government. Now no-one is in charge any longer. Russia's nuclear missiles are in the hands of soldiers who haven't been paid for months. The Mafia is running what's left of the economy.

All around the world economies are trembling if not collapsing. Financial markets are running scared. People who have known only prosperity are about to find out how the other half lives.

Different cultures are at loggerheads. Terrorists are doing their worst. Human behaviour, morally speaking, is going from bad to worse. Things are falling apart. And the new, up-and-coming generation is blowing its collective mind with every drug it can lay its hands on.

Woe, woe and ever more woe! It's not very encouraging, is it? Where do we go from here?

We do as we've always done. We strive to behave decently towards each other despite all the pressures coercing us to do otherwise. We batten down the hatches to keep panic contained. We smile as much as we can in these uncertain circumstances, over which we have so little control.

Above all, we hope - that sanity, common sense and basic human decency defeat the odds and prevail and that mankind's downhill race somehow can be stopped and turned around.

Time for the NHS to clean up its act

It says something about the poor state of hygiene in Britain's hospitals that the nation's nurses and cleaners are joining forces to campaign for an improvement.

This week the Royal College of Nursing and the Association of Domestic Managers jointly backed a call from the Infection Control Nurses Association for strict standards and regular checks to see if wards are clean enough.

They're worried about what a lot of patients are worried about as well: the fact that a disturbing number of people who go into hospital acquire an infection there that often takes a lot of clearing up. The situation is becoming more serious with the arrival on the bug scene of the bacteria MRSA, which is resistant to antibiotics.

And there, I reckon, lies the key to the problem - in antibiotics. The medical profession has grown too used to using them, not only as a cure-all, as an official report pointed out yesterday, but as an alternative to strict standards of hygiene.

At one time it was accepted that a hospital environment had to be as sterile as possible. Everything was scrubbed and disinfected so there was no hiding place for germs.

But with the advent of antibiotics there was no need to be so fastidious. If germs caused trouble, a course of tablets would zap them. So costs and corners were cut and standards slipped.

A nurse now only in her 40s told me that when she was young and working in hospitals they were trained to take great care. As soon as a patient was discharged from hospital, the bed was stripped and the mattress cover and frame washed over with disinfectant before the bed was made again with clean linen for the next patient.

Now, though, all they seem to get is a change of sheets and pillow case.

When I was visiting a relative in hospital last year, in a surgical ward, I was surprised to see that the thermometer which was being popped into his mouth every few hours was left lying uncovered on his bedside table between times - not standing in a pot of saline solution to help to keep it sterile, as used to be the case.

It was exposed to the germs of all the other patients and their visitors, not to mention dust, which is largely produced from dead skin cells.

MRSA has made it vital for hospitals to get rid of their slipshod ways and go back to the standards of hygiene they used to take for granted. Poorly people shouldn't have to worry that if they go into hospital they could well become even more poorly because of something nasty they pick up in there.

Nice to learn that the people at the front line are pushing for an improvement in standards. All they need to do now is convince their managers and the Department of Health.

Hoaxers' warning to the TV bosses...

On Tuesday we learned that ITV is planning to make 30 "fly-on-the-wall" series this year - those documentaries which purport to show ordinary people at work and play.

The trouble is, they aren't ordinary people. As the maker of the hugely popular Airline admitted this week, they're specially selected for their star quality. They're show-offs. And sometimes they aren't all they seem to be.

We learned that on Wednesday, when it was revealed that a young woman and an older man taking part in a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary about daughters and possessive fathers turned out not to be related at all.

They had hoaxed the programme-makers, who had to cancel the documentary at the last minute.

May that serve as a warning to all documentary-makers - and particularly the makers of the "docu-soaps". Because there's a growing suspicion that by packing the schedules with their down-market offerings, which are much cheaper to make than dramas, the programme-makers and schedulers are having a good laugh at the joint expense of both the acting profession and the viewers.

The day Frank butchered our language

Optimist of the Week has to be Coronation Street character Leanne Battersby, who told her father, the terminally-objectionable Les: "Don't be so thick, Dad."

Some hopes! How can the man be anything other than thick? He has the skin of a rhinoceros and the IQ of one of its droppings.

About as thick, though more cunning with it, is EastEnders' Frank Butcher, who the other night told his former wife, in the most baffling soap confession of the year: "Ah'm a Mindyfeet, Pat".

A Mindyfeet? What could one of those be? Was it cockney-speak for "total prat"? Or was he telling her that he's not a human being after all, and hails from another planet. Is a Mindyfeet something like a Klingon? It wouldn't be all that hard to believe, would it, looking at Frank?

This caused much concern at Priestley Towers until the penny dropped. What Frank was doing was actually throwing in the towel - or "admitting defeat". They really should start sub-titling EastEnders.

Enjoy Mike Priestley's Yorkshire Walks

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