The Wind Doth Blow...

And I do sit at me desk thumping away on the laptop... and do get nervous as things do whistle and hum out there. But me and The Old Man remain safe. The power still works. We are not wet. Nor blowed away.
He still has a puffy, chapped  and scabby hand. We still wait for some kind of narrowing down of the cause... or some kind of blood test that the GP can't quite get to happen. Yesterday I answered the phone to a bright young thing who informed me that  she was ringing from the NHS Referral service... that this be just a "courtesy call" to inform The Old Man that his "referral" has been put through... As it took me a while to work out that this was the gist of the call, I sat in stunned silence for a beat too long to ask "What referral?"... and anyway I am not The Old Man so guess she could maybe not be telling me "which referral".
On the subject of medical privacy? Has you UK people had the leaflet about your own NHS GP data being fed centrally unless you object? If you read the leaflet you will find that this is not for medical purposes... i.e... it is not designed to co-ordinate your treatment, etc... except in so far as they say it will help planning. And medical researchers, drug companies, insurance companies may be able to consult parts of it...
Naturally The Old Man already has a view on this and is not convinced that individual identities will be stripped from the data as efficiently as promised.
You can opt out of the scheme. The Old Man was provided with a couple of forms by his GP.  So we have.