Here’s a new holiday card design for this year! I have only a limited supply of them, but the choices on offer for Wondermark holiday cards are myriad. This year, I am not making a printed 2020 calendar. What I have done, though, is re-issued four of my previous calendars (from 2013, 2014, 2015, and […]
A British vicar got more than he expected from his first attempt at an online sermon when he leaned too close to a candle on a cross and his sweater caught fire.
Clio Ajana writes about the scars the pandemic is leaving with us - and how they may presage growth in the time to come.
Continue reading Column: Scars at Beltane at The Wild Hunt.
Pagan healthcare providers discuss how they are coping with the stresses of the pandemic and how the power of their spiritual practices sustains them.
We want to see your photos, videos and audio of what it is like doing your job on the frontline
Staff working for the NHS have expressed concern about the lack of protective personal equipment, with photographs circulating on social media of staff creating their own makeshift items, including with clinical waste bags.
We want to see healthcare workers’ photos, videos and audio of what it is like doing their job.
Continue reading...Resuming the season is absurd and the ‘safety’ ideas are terrible, but whatever football decides it must decide together
“You eat alone, you choke.” During the years of plenty it became a habit to compare the Premier League’s wielding of power – always with a note of admiration – to the structures of a mafia family.
It isn’t hard to see why: the hierarchy of captains, the beautifully ruthless sense of unity, of a cartel of self-propelling interests. And yet the thing about mafia families is that now and then those interests start pulling in different ways. In mob lore breaking ranks is sometimes referred to as “eating alone”, with a certainty that bad things follow – and worst of all that bad business follows.
Continue reading...Teenager remains in hospital as two men are arrested after collision on Streatham High Road
A 16-year-old cyclist is in a life-threatening condition after being hit by two cars in south London.
The boy was critically injured in the collision in Streatham High Road shortly before 11.20pm on Friday.
Continue reading...Epidemiologists use the term to describe tragic excess deaths – but for Covid-19 it seems to be the de facto government policy
There’s a term we use in epidemiology to capture the essence of increases in deaths, or excess mortality, above and beyond normal expectations: “harvesting”. During heatwaves, or a bad season of influenza, additional deaths above what would be normally seen in the population fit this description. Harvesting usually affects older people and those who are already sick. Generally, it is viewed as a tragic, unfortunate, but largely unpreventable consequence of natural events. It carries with it connotations of an acceptable loss of life. It is, in a sense, what happens as part of a normal life in normal times. But the word also has darker connotations: those of sacrifice, reaping, culling. As such, while it may appear in textbooks of epidemiology, it doesn’t occur in national influenza strategic plans or national discourse. The concept of harvesting is restricted to epidemiological circles.
But what if politicians promote the notion of harvesting (while declining to use the term) where it is not a “natural” consequence of events but a direct consequence of government policy? What if the medical and nursing world do not accept harvesting in these circumstances? What if a policy that results in harvesting cannot be articulated because it is unacceptable to the broader population? This is where we have got to with the coronavirus pandemic. Nowhere better exemplifies this tension between a policy and its popular acceptance than the effects of coronavirus in nursing homes.
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