One second; two seconds; three seconds; four seconds; five seconds. 

According to recent reports, in those five seconds, Cristiano Ronaldo has just earned as much as our nurses and nurses and ambulance crews earn in an hour!

Now count to 15 and a similar amount has been earned by Ed Sheeran. 

Put another way, if a junior doctor works for a couple of hundred hours, he/she could just afford the reported price of a ticket to see a "queen of pop" lip-sync for an hour and a half "live" on stage!

I fell out with football many years ago, when cheating players started falling over and feigning injury in order to fool the referee into awarding free-kicks and penalties; and the modern four-chord ditties I hear on the local radio stations these days rarely satisfy my musical preferences. 

However, it is not for me to suggest whether these entertainers are worth their money or not.  

But it is difficult not to contrast an industry, which seems to have plentiful resources, with others in which, we are told, the bank is empty! 

Ironically, these high paid people are (only) entertainers; the lower paid people are potentially saving lives!

Do we really put the value of the entertainer hundreds and hundreds over that of a carer?

All my life, my ethos has always been: hard work deserves fair reward and if you need more, work harder! 

This echoes what my parents believed; and how we brought up our own children. 

Sadly I have recently started to wonder if this ideal is still relevant. 

After all, the pot is only so big and, these days, Western civilisation seems to be putting increasing value on entertainment while decreasing the value of the nuts and bolts of society. 

Whilst I doubt this is sustainable, it could go some way to explain why many of our youngsters are more inclined to aspire to fame and fortune associated with reality TV shows or subscribed social media outlets, rather than study for years to enter, say, the under-funded care industry that is crying out for personnel.  

There is little doubt our country is in a mess. 

I would normally be one to condemn strikes. 

But, if my work was currently valued by society as less than one thousandth of that of a minstrel and even less of that of a football player, I might also be tempted to take drastic action.