As I mentioned earlier in the week, I had my (first) vaccination on Wednesday, at the place which is not actually my GP's health centre but the adjacent building where the physiotherapy etc for local health authority normally hangs out.
All very smoothly done - security guy sanitises one's hands on the way in, one is directed into socially ( Read more... )

‘Naked and starving’: letters tell how English paupers fought for rights 200 years ago: [P]reviously unpublished letters of penniless and disabled paupers living in the early 19th century reveal the sophisticated and powerful rhetoric they used to secure regular welfare payments from parish authorities, despite being barely able to read and write.
( Read more... )

I will concede, Clem Attlee fandom is probably pretty niche.
On the other hand, Lady Attlee once voiced in an interview that Clem was quite the tiger in bed, possibly confirming the rumours about bald men...
And in these days of slimy soundbite merchants, grey and getting on with the job of building the Welfare State and having people make jokes ( Read more... )

I depose that the week in which it was revealed that Charles Dickens tried to get his (sane but inconvenient) wife committed to a lunatic asylum is not the week to hymn 'family life [as] the most successful form of social security the world has ever known'.
The guy is getting his head handed to him fairly comprehensively on Twitter, but really. The ( Read more... )

When a good friend cuts you out of their life, it can be as devastating as the end of a romance. How should you cope? You know, I think sometimes we should accept that some friendships are dependent upon contingent conditions and when those go away, it's difficult to maintain the friendship (or maybe I'm still bitter about someone who I used to ( Read more... )

That thing that's been going around on Twitter: 'You wake up in 1918. What job are you qualified to do?'
Um. Is this a time-travel scenario and have I arrived back in 1918 with all the advantages conveyed by the Welfare State, the 1944 Education Act, and modern medicine at my disposal? (And will my flu-jab protect me against the ravages of Spanish ( Read more... )

Last week I had the pneumococcal vaccine, courtesy of what is still, mostly, a beneficient National Health Service.
Unlike the flu shot, it is a one-off and should, as they say, See Me Out.
However, while I tend not to have any repercussions from the flu shot, this one gave me a sore arm, like, really sore for 2-3 days and still quite tender after ( Read more... )

[R]ed tape also means regulations that protect citizens, at a certain cost to companies that otherwise have little incentive to sacrifice some profit to mitigate risk. It is because of red tape that you cannot buy a flammable sofa, and that you are very unlikely to die in an air crash.

Much red tape, indeed, is the frozen memory of past disaster. ( Read more... )

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There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner, 1952
Really, Noel, you had no idea, you didn't know you were born.
Though perhaps this is the reaction of someone of the generation, class and gender for whom 1952 (Conservative Government elected into power, rationing still on), was, if not Happy Days Are Here Again or even Good Times Just Around the ( Read more... )

Went aaaargh at reading this: There was much more of a philanthropic bent in Victorian society and I think what might have happened to us is we had so many years of a well-functioning welfare state that personal and business philanthropy was no longer required.

a) the inefficiency and inadequacy of Victorian charity, not to mention the degradation ( Read more... )