A curate's egg at the Polite Vicar

In a bid to raise the tone I'd like to introduce what might be called the 'reviewer's paradox.' It goes like this, what do you write when your experience was just about ok but everyone else with you had a pretty rough time?

That is the problem a recent trip to this venue posed, to keep the clerical metaphor going it was a bit like the curate's egg, some parts were excellent, others less so.

The spicy nachos, 'Jingle Burger' and chocolate orange cheesecake combo I went for was well worth the close to £13 bill. Perhaps because the only thing Christmas related was the name of the burger that probably appears under a less spangly name the other eleven months of the year.

Where things went wrong was with the one thing everyone else had come for, a good old down home Christmas dinner. The vegetables were undercooked to the point of still being in the soil, things didn't get any better with dessert, unless hunt the Christmas pudding is your favorite party game.

The portion given to one of my companions and then hidden under a lake of custard could have been served up by Scrooge himself. To be fair though the profiteroles served to another resembled a miniature mountain range drizzled with chocolate sauce.

Maybe the chef was helping the time pass by playing dessert roulette, fine if your number comes up, not so good if it doesn't.

To their credit the staff were helpfulness incarnate when we complained about the veg, it's just doing something about it seemed to take forever. I suppose cook was off in some far corner of the kitchen wearing a tux and sweating over having put all his white chocolate gateaux down on black.

The Polite Vicar isn't the Ritz Grill; you expect competent simplicity not haute cuisine. For the most part that's what we got at a reasonable price too.

The trouble is some even simpler mistakes made on a night when the pub was far from busy mean we probably won't be back in a hurry. As any gambler knows you only get one throw of the dice and the poor old Vicar lost.

The Polite Vicar
600 Etruria Road
Newcastle-under-Lyme
ST5 0LU

A psychologist walks into A pub

It’s early on a wet but mild December evening and I’m standing in a pub just outside Stoke town centre waiting for a psychologist to walk into the bar.

This sounds like the set-up for a joke, actually it was the prelude to a surprising evening.

The pub in question is The Glebe, which a friend recently described as having a distinctly ‘London’ vibe. Never having supped in the smoke I can’t comment, but being close to the campus of Staffordshire University gives it a more cosmopolitan atmosphere than most other pubs in town.

When he arrives the psychologist turns out to be an affable man called Dave Spence wearing a beard and a Christmas Jumper.

The talk, part of the ongoing Psychology in the pub series is on the ‘Psychology of Belief’, or more accurately the point where it turns into superstition. Something that we the audience, as smart broadsheet reading metropolitans could never be prone to; perish the thought.

Only, as Spence points out the more irrational elements of belief have a habit of catching us off guard. Otherwise reasonable people refuse to walk under ladders or wear their lucky socks to the most important meeting of their career.

Along the way he poked a little gentle fun at conflicting biblical accounts of the nativity, Christmas traditions that are less ancient than they seem and internet UFO photographs.

There was even time for a game of pass the parcel, something that brought back memories from my suburban childhood of squirming with embarrassment in case the music stopped while I was holding the parcel.

Thankfully it didn’t and so I was able to appreciate the whole thing as a metaphor for how belief is often several layers of wrapping around a confection, in this case a chocolate Santa.

The tone was light hearted with plenty of banter between Spence and his audience. Anyone willing to look a little closer would easily see a more serious message behind the jokes.

Beliefs are what help us make sense of the world and our place in it. Fair enough so far as it goes, apart from the fact they tend to be based on unconscious biases, making us worryingly easy to manipulate.

That is all well and good if it’s just a soft drink company fooling us into thinking it invented Santa Claus. Less so though when the manipulation is done by people with more sinister agendas.

Like getting a boorish reality TV star into the White House for example but something like that couldn’t happen, could it?

Local Greens respond to Bradwell closure plans.

North Staffs Green Party today made public its response to the ‘My Care My Way Home First’ consultation launched by Staffordshire NHS Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).

In October the CCG announced plans to close 63 beds at Bradwell Hospital used to care for frail and elderly patients.

The move came on the back of threats to beds at other community hospitals in Cheadle, Leek and Burslem.

Health and community campaign groups expressed concern over the plans, as did several NHS staff employed at the hospital, the long term future of which is now in doubt.

The response states that the bed closures will have a ‘detrimental impact on the healthcare of the population of North Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent.

Local Green Party Coordinator and author of the response Jan Zablocki said: ‘No one should be fooled into thinking it is just about more people living longer with more complex healthcare needs; it’s about much more than that.’

He added that: ‘It is about the future scale and shape of our health service. These bed closures represent a highly political agenda in which the NHS is being bludgeoned between the hammer of Tory privatization and budget cuts and the anvil of Labour’s massive PFI debt.’

The response highlights a number of problem areas in the plan put forward by the CCG, including the pressures likely to be placed on the Royal Stoke University Hospital as a result, particularly as services are transferred from Stafford to the RSUH site.

It also identifies a problem in relation to district nursing services being unable to cope with caring for more patients in their own homes, even though this is a key element of the plans put forward by NHS managers.

Figures obtained under freedom of information by the Green Party show that staffing levels have fallen dramatically between 2012 and 2016.

Concern regarding staffing was expressed in a report conducted by Sedgwick Igoe and Associates for the CCG in 2012 and again in a report by the Care Quality Commission in 2016.

Despite this CCG chief executive Marcus Warnes told a meeting of North Staffs Pensioners Convention in October that nine out of ten people currently occupying beds in community hospitals would have better outcomes being cared for at home.

North Staffs Green Party Campaigns Officer Adam Colclough said: ‘The CCG have not been honest with people about either the motivations for or the impact of these bed closures.’

Commenting on the announcement made earlier this week he said: ‘although any delay to the closure of the beds at Bradwell is welcome the problem of how to provide adequate community care when there aren’t enough staff available remains.’

Adding that: ‘Protecting the NHS is a key theme in Green Party policy and as a member of the Patients Congress I have raised this issue several times and will continue to do so until the CCG gives local people an honest answer.’

In conclusion Jan Zablocki said: ‘For those with their eyes and ears open the sirens are sounding and the blue lights flashing and the patient in mortal danger is the NHS itself.’