A Time of Magic

Although most people’s first instinct is to hit the search engines, realistically that’s only going to give you a superficial knowledge at best and at worst a seriously distorted one.

Another more sensible option is to take a course on your disease. Although, so far, that’s mainly an option for the various chronic diseases, that situation is gradually changing as more universities are realising that people are interested in disease for reasons other than that they need to trea it. Thus, you can take quite in-depth courses on things like diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Although these are available as entry-level courses, don’t underestimate the amount of medical terminology that you’ll need to get through in these courses and don’t let it put you off that many of your fellow students are paramedics and nurses.

Definitely a better option than the superficial internet search approach!

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.

These days it seems to be accepted that children will be violent in schools whilst teachers can’t respond with a touch never mind a smack.

Whilst it seems wrong to return to the days when caning was there as an option, it seems as though the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. For example, we recently found out that it’s forbidden to touch a child in any circumstances. That sounds a laudable thing on the whole but the problem was that the child was touched (restrained) because he was violently beating another child. Not a fight mind you, just a brutal attack by one child on another.

Interestingly, the subsequent interview was entirely focused on the business of touching a child and didn’t even enquire as to the injuries which the victim received. That’s definitely very, very wrong. The whole process ended up seeming to give approval to the violence which I’m quite sure was never the intent behind the rules which it drew upon and yet that’s what happened with punishment actually being, unbelievably, applied to the victim as well as the aggressor.

In this school, it would appear that nothing effective can be done either to stop violence nor to protect the victim of any violence.