SO… more than £23m is needed to repair Barnsley Hospital ‘including almost £3m in urgent work’.

When is someone in authority going to decide to stop chucking money away and push a case to bulldoze it and build another?

And not on that site either because anyone caught up in the morning traffic on Gawber Road trying not to get to the hospital has to queue up behind cars trying to get into the car park. It might have been fit for purpose in the 1970s but it isn’t now. It is a mess.

We need a new hospital built and that one to limp on until the new one is complete. We will already have £23m saved towards it if we don’t spend it on repairs. It is outdated, it is too small, it is ridiculous.

Of course, the NHS throws so much money away it is incredible. It is way too big to be managed efficiently, so it isn’t.

This from a cousin of mine who is a consultant trying her best up in Scotland to bring in some sense.

Take for instance a faulty lightbulb in an office. Would cost a couple of quid in a household. But no… in the NHS it will probably not be bought direct but from a company, who subcontract to another company and that lightbulb replacement will probably end up costing £30 at least.

Everyone is subcontracting to someone else and taking their cut. We have a governmental minister and a chief exec in charge of the NHS who are just going along with things as they are because it is too big a project to strip back to brass tacks.

My god, I wish I had that job because I’d make heads roll. It needs a massive team of people to look at everything from base level, get rid of all these subcontractors and buck-passers who are bleeding the NHS dry.

Won’t happen because it’s too sensible and there is no room for sense in the system.

Nearly got caught out by an online fraudster this week saying I needed to log onto PayPal to get a refund.

It’s no guarantee of course, but if you do get an email, just click on the sender to bring up their email address and if it says ‘xi8anweri@phillipines.xi’ it’s a bit of a clue it’s a trickster. Then block, even if they spring up like roided-up dandelions.

I have been doing a lot of travelling on my book tour recently.

I was caught up in the terrible M1 delays following the crash that killed two young people recently (it took me over an hour’s trip to get from Junction 37 to 36).

And it also took me four hours to get to Liverpool (should be less than two). The M62 is a long straight road, it is not its fault, it is idiot drivers who cut up, who speed and we have to drive our own cars and watch out for their shenanigans.

I saw a driver overtake on a blind bend in Silkstone last week to save what? Thirty seconds… WTF?

We are also in a season of road works and diversions and it does not make for easy driving especially at night but I saw some overhead lettering on the motorway the other day which struck home: ‘Arrive Alive’.

It says everything, doesn’t it? Throttle back on the speed, take care, don’t drive tired or with substances in your system. Arrive home alive, folks. Better late than never.