I'm all for the current campaign to discourage people from dialling 000 for an ambulance except in a real emergency.

Clearly, there’s a problem with people who thoughtlessly and selfishly abuse this vital service and therefore threaten the response time for really desperate callers, but the message that one should call only when the situation is “life-threatening, critical or serious” doesn’t exactly make the decision-making any easier.

Take the case of the worried mother of a toddler with a very high temperature or any of a dozen other distressing symptoms about which there are so many warnings, like meningococcal disease.

She can hardly be expected in the wee small hours to coolly and rationally decide whether the situation is serious, critical or life-threatening.

I just hope she would rely on her motherly instinct and common sense, and I hate to think she would hesitate to pick up the phone.

Qatar riches

“News is news” is the perennial defence of newspaper editors criticised for their selection and presentation of stories ranging from the trivial to the traumatically tragic, but one editor’s lowly filler item is another’s front-page screamer.

I’ve just read an email forwarded on from a British public servant working in what he describes as “the world’s richest country per capita, where everyone will be squillionaires in five years time because Qatar is home to the largest gas fields in the world”.

With understandable bemusement, he quotes the page one headline of the Qatar Times, the country’s biggest English-language newspaper: ‘Truck overturns, many sheep killed’.

Fleeting memories

Last week AAT pondered the downside of life for the greys, that population group also described as seniors, oldies, wrinklies, frugals and silly old farts, but we’re not the only ones doing it tough.

Spare a thought, too, for mature-age students.

In my understanding, that’s anyone who didn’t go straight to uni after completing secondary school and who, after a gap ranging from a year to half a lifetime, has gone back to study.

Some study for that piece of paper that will get them a new job, others just for the joy of learning.

Most of them do very well in their studies, maybe because of ingrained habits of hard work and application acquired at the school of hard knocks, but more probably because of their drive to lift themselves out of whatever rut they may be in.

Even for the brightest, though, there are difficulties along the way, particularly when one is past that certain age when good recall is no longer taken for granted.

One busy mother who has to balance family and work priorities with her study requirements tells me that as part of her course, she had to do a lot of reading on memory, which she duly did.

Trouble was that with all her distractions, she couldn’t for the life of her remember what she’d read.

And Another Thing

Mulling over the effect of distraction on short-term memory, the thought struck me that a forgetful Frenchman over-fond of a certain green liqueur could well be diagnosed as absinthe-minded.

rich.29@bigpond.net.au