Yesterday I read on the Telegraph’s website that Katherine Bowes-Lyon, a cousin of the Queen who was severely mentally disabled and had lived in an institution most of her life, had died aged 87. Her sister Nerissa, who had a similar disability and life history, died in 1986. The story was first revealed to the public in the late 1980s and Channel 4 ran a programme on them in 2011 (reviewed here), which also served as a study on attitudes to people with such disabilities in the early to mid 20th century and on the way conditions for them have changed over the years, which was panned in the media as giving no new information on the Bowes-Lyon sisters than was revealed in the 1980s. The Telegraph’s coverage was shocking, however; it claimed that she and her sister had been subject to “crass intrusion” and called her death “peace at last” in their headline. She was buried in a “private family funeral” and her death, on 23rd February, has only now been announced “because of the sensitivities involved”.
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This morning I read a news report and a blog about a single mother who is fighting to keep her two daughters out of the foster care system in Alberta, and find them a home after a temporary arrangement broke down. Sarah Vibert, who lives in Edmonton, has multiple sclerosis and in 2009 suffered a non-traumatic spinal-cord injury that left most of her body paralysed; she has only the limited use of one arm. She is currently in full-time foster care and her husband is out of the country and does not contribute maintenance. The girls are eight and nine, and Sarah home-schools them in her care home during the day, but they live with family friends, but those friends can no longer look after them because of family problems of their own. She explains the situation more fully in 
It’s been reported recently that a man who killed a man with one punch on a street in Bournemouth has been sentenced to 
Today the 
It was reported today that there has been a rise in the number of teenagers under 18 admitted to adult psychiatric wards, and that these were sometimes hundreds of miles from home and often proved to be highly unsuitable places for them. The BBC reported this 
So, last week I got my replacement for my iPad, which I was dissatisfied with because of the completely inadequate Apple keypad (see 
I’ve just had my second letter in about a month published in the New Statesman, a British left-of-centre political magazine, this time on the subject of private education, which they ran an extensive feature on two weeks ago and which continues to dominate their letters page. Last week they published a 
The Thursday before last was apparently “Zero Tolerance of FGM day”, accompanied by widespread media coverage of various campaigns against it, a petition which apparently gained two signatures per second, interviews with anti-FGM campaigners and various editorials, particularly in the Guardian. In some of these editorials, the authors gave free rein to prejudices that liberals normally manage to keep hidden, and fail to consider whether some of the potential cures aren’t worse than the disease. As is so often the case, the white liberal gets angry when others don’t respond to appeals to become “civilised”.
Well, I’m sending my iPad back to the vendor today. Amazon’s policy is that an item is returnable for about a month, and I’ve had mine a week and a half (although I made this decision last Saturday, but have only just got round to printing out the return labels and packing it up).
The other day I took delivery of my new tablet computer, an iPad mini with a Retina display, which cost £290 plus delivery charges on Amazon. It’s a wi-fi only model; I can’t afford another contract for a data SIM when my mobile data is more than adequate already. The reason I bought it, despite never having considered buying one until a couple of weeks before, was that I was getting frustrated with the poor quality of my Nexus 7 tablet and the apps that run on it. It’s the cheapest Nexus by far and it really shows in the quality and reliability (or lack thereof) of the device and the performance of apps on it. As I said in a recent entry, I was blown away by what I saw when I tried out a relative’s iPad (the demonstration models in the Apple store don’t really do the system, let alone the software available for it, justice).
This morning I went for my latest blood test, which I have to have roughly every six months or a year — I can’t even remember as I have so many of them — because of my thyroid condition (which is a severely underactive or absent thyroid, treated with levothyroxine daily since I was diagnosed at age four or five). It’s no big deal; I get a test form with a bag attached from my doctor, go to Kingston Hospital’s blood test department, have it done and go on my way. This morning I hardly had to wait five minutes, and the procedure itself took less than that. What annoyed me was something the nurse said just before she put the needle in, which they seem to say to a lot of people these days (and they even say it on Casualty).
I’ve used Android since 2009, and I’m currently on my fourth phone and first tablet. I’ve used Twitter since about the same time, maybe a little bit more. Having a smartphone pretty much makes Twitter useful; it means you can communicate when you’re not at your desk and read and share things there and then rather than later, when they may have sunk down the timeline already and interest may have waned. My first smartphone came with a pretty awful Twitter client, HTC Peep, which slowed down my whole phone and I ultimately 
Earlier this week, there was a so-called 
Regarding the ongoing case of