"Robin" wrote:
Or maybe people should just do
what almost everyone does here and realise that life is about more
than the daily grind, and an opportunity to stand outside in the sun,
drink a cold beer, meet people you'd never normally meet, and to cap
it all get to watch some entertaining sport is worth more for your
longterm wellbeing than worrying about ambulance response times*.

I accept that having sat in the back of an ambulance trying to keep
someone conscious while it makes an emergency transfer (with blue lights
and sirens) through London traffic gives me a possibly biased view. The
more so as the route would have been blocked by the TdF route

Seriously? Grief top trumps? If you want to compare notes on the number
of hours spent sat outside intensive care/HDU, or the number of ambulance
trips or deaths in the family required to have an opinion, I'd suggest it's
a pretty ****ty way to try and argue (and don't assume you'd come out on
top, either.)

But it
is indeed a matter of balance. I am glad you are able to be so
nonchalant.

Of course it may just be that when you've watched enough people die you
realise it's not the way you go that's important, it's actually living a
life beforehand that matters. If a few hours of road closures is enough to
raise your blood pressure this much, and your life is so utterly joyless
that you can't embrace the opportunity instead of focusing on the
inconvenience, I'd suggest that when that final curtain does fall and your
life flashes before your eyes the least of your regrets is going to be that
the ambulance took a minute longer.

And odds are you wouldn't even get to know if some poor sod
died as a result of delay getting to hospital so people can watch the
TdF go by - not even it were one of your friends/family - as the
ambulance service and NHS will of course have made plans.

If they've made plans (which I'm quite sure they have,) then it's likely
that in fact nobody will die as a result of delays getting to hospital,
isn't it?

By the way, you do know how easily London's roads are disrupted, don't
you, so as to give informed consent?

I've lived most of my life there, own a house in south London and am there
pretty much every week. I even cheerfully paid (indeed still pay I
believe, not that I pay a lot of attention to my council tax bill) the
extra on my council tax to pay for the olympics while listening to people
like you moan for five years about what a disaster it was going to be. So
yeah I think I have a pretty good idea - and the answer is that amazingly,
despite what the sort of people who call a traffic jam "chaos" would say,
the wheels of commerce keep turning, the city keeps on growing, and life
keeps on being lived. (I also know that the only people who drive in
London are bloody fools to start with, but that's by the by.)

Great cities are resilient. The idea that Al Qaeda can stop worrying about
bombing because actually all they need is a few guys with HiVis and a Road
Closed sign to bring the city to its knees is beyond absurd...


So the traffic will be a bit ****ty for an afternoon. Seriously, deal with
it. If it really bothers you that much, take a holiday - it might well be
what you need to postpone that ambulance journey...