I’m still in occasional contact via social media with students who were in my A-level classes when I retired some 15 years ago and we ran away to Spain for a while. Over the last two or three years quite a lot of them have had babies, understandable as they are now in their early thirties, a good age to be having babies, in my opinion anyway.
It seems that they are the lucky ones who can actually afford to have babies because according to Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian “since 2012, births have plummeted by an alarming and economically harmful 12.2%. Children have become unaffordable to a generation that is worse off than their parents at baby-producing age, now spending a third of their wages on nurseries, with lower incomes, higher rents and heavy debt”.
Indeed, our daughter has been shopping around to find a cheaper alternative to the private nursery her youngest child has been going to.
There’s worse stuff too. According to a report in The London Economic “Victorian” illnesses such as scurvy and rickets are being seen in the UK again. Figures show that 171 people were treated for scurvy and 482 patients were admitted with rickets, 405 of them children. And from 2022 to April 2023, 10,896 NHS patients — including 312 children — were hospitalised with malnutrition in England.
Dr Clare Gerada, president of the Royal College of GPs, is reported to have said: “The poorest people in this country are poorer than any other counterparts in Europe . . . and it’s poor diet.
The most common reason a child under five has a general anaesthetic now is for dental care, so that’s a sign of malnutrition.”
Even the increase in obesity is apparently an indicator of malnutrition as so many people can’t afford to eat healthily.
Dr Gerada also said, “This isn’t about the health system, it’s about the social determinants of ill health, indicative of the last 15 years of austerity.”
There you go: austerity is bad for you; it makes you ill and might kill you in the end!
So, if children born here get a raw deal, it’s not surprising that migrant children are not treated well by this government. Here’s another Michael Rosen poem (described by Polly Toynbee as “Stop all the clocks” for children) protesting about murals painted out in migrant children’s centres:
“Paint over Mickey Mouse
Burn Where the Wild Things Are
Pulverise the Lego
Set fire to the Christmas tree star.
Seize all the teddies.
Bury every skipping rope
Paint the walls dark brown
Abolish all hope.”
At the other end of the scale, here’s Zoe Williams writing about ball pits for adults, as a way of relaxing apparently. For the uninformed (lots of people of my age according to Ms Williams! a ball pit is sort of huge boxed area full of quite soft balls. Small children, it seems, enjoy the sensory experience of thrashing about in them. Oddly enough my daughter, her two older offspring and I were talking about them the other day. According to my daughter, it’s quite common for three year olds to get so excited that they pee in the ball pit. The pee, of course, collects at the bottom so children often get out with wet socks. Not only that but the balls are nicely coated with pee! Don’t let your children touch food after playing in the ball pit!!
It is to be hoped that adults’ ball pits do not suffer from the same incontinence problem!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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