A Time of Magic

When things are quite so bad with the government finances as they seem to be in the UK just about every sector is looking at cuts.

Perhaps one of the saddest of those is the education sector where there are quite a number of schools that have been cutting back on maintenance for a number of years because they’d a lovely new school building coming along in just another year or two.

Except that now many of those new school buildings have been axed.

Unfortunately it is one of many necessary cuts across the government departments but it means that many of our kids will have to make do with school buildings for perhaps another decade and many of those have basically been let go in terms of any kind of significant maintenance. It seems sure that a lot of that maintenance will simply have to be carried out now as the buildings are very much at the low point of their life by now.

What is a little confusing in all this is that the buildings weren’t constructed better in the first place. One local hospital was only finished in the late 1950s yet is now needing a complete rebuild. I don’t think that 60 years is a very long time for a building to last.

I can understand the need for vitamin supplements in the war years and indeed in the post war years of austerity when diets weren’t quite what they should be. However, these days it seems something of a puzzle given the wide range of foods commonly available and the overall improvements in our diets over the years.

Yet, still there are significant numbers of vitamin supplements on the supermarket shelves.

To be fair, some of that is down to the rise in the numbers of vegetarians in the post-war period. Some vitamins simply aren’t in non-animal products so they’re going to have to take them unless their food is contaminated with microbes of faeces-based fertilizers (so, no, there are no 100% vegetarians). Similarly there are others on various diets that exclude one or more vitamins. But even so it does seem odd that there are quite so many vitamins on the shelves.

One of the biggest problems with eczema is that it’s generally caused by something or other in your environment that you’re allergic to but tracking down that something can take years and kids can grow out of it before they’ve worked out what it was.

Thus although obviously attacking the problem at the root is best it’s rarely possible so eczema treatment tends to attack the symptoms instead thus there’s a whole host of creams and bath oils which basically aim to moisturise the skin and thereby get rid of the eczema. Our little guy seems to have worked through an enormous number of these over the years but annoyingly the eczema seems to go away all by itself now and again. That’s happening increasingly frequently of late so it may be that he’s gradually growing out of it.