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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Consider, if you will, the peculiar condition of a nation in which the very medicines dispensed to relieve suffering are themselves causing ruination – and the leaflets warning of such ruination contain errors that have stood uncorrected for at least five years. This Author does not know whether to reach for her smelling salts or her solicitor.
The Crown Medicines Authority has been caught – by none other than the Broadcasting Society, bless their industrious souls – having described impulse-control disorders caused by a family of dopamine agonist drugs as “uncommon”, affecting fewer than one in a hundred patients. One study, the largest of its kind, suggests the true figure is closer to one in six among Parkinson’s patients. One in six, Gentle Reader. The difference between “uncommon” and “one in six” is, one might argue, the difference between a footnote and a catastrophe. The consequences for patients have included ruinous debt, broken marriages, criminality, and suicide – and over 350 souls have come forward to share their accounts. The Crown Medicines Authority has now admitted an error exists and has begun reviewing warnings for all eight such medications. This Author awaits the apology with bated breath, though she suspects it shall arrive approximately five years too late.
Meanwhile, across the Channel, the great European bureaucratic machine grinds magnificently onward – which is to say, it grinds to a halt entirely. The new biometric border checks due to commence at the Port of Dover and the Channel Passage on the tenth of April have been delayed yet again, owing to what the French authorities delicately term “ongoing technical issues.” Passengers were to have their photographs and fingerprints taken before entering France. Instead, they shall be asked additional questions at the border – which is to say, they shall be subjected to the same mild inconvenience that has characterised continental travel since approximately the reign of Napoleon, but without the fingerprints. With Easter nearly upon us and the month drawing to its close, This Author notes with only the gentlest of smirks that the Continental Alliance has been “gradually introducing” this system since October of last year. Gradually, indeed.
Turning from one crisis of infrastructure to another – this one rather more urgent – This Author must draw your attention to the alarming shortage of sonographers across the Southern Kingdom. One in four posts currently lies vacant; shortages are most acute in the north-west and south-east. Pregnant women awaiting scans at twelve and twenty weeks, and cancer patients requiring urgent diagnosis, are being made to wait. The Society of Radiographers reports that demand for ultrasound has risen sharply while training pipelines have not kept pace. The Government assures us it is “aware of the pressure” and is planning new community services. This Author is certain that such planning will arrive with all the speed and efficiency of the biometric border checks above. In the meantime, anxious mothers and worried patients continue to wait – and waiting, when one’s health hangs in the balance, is no small thing.
On a rather more combustible note: a historic six-storey silk mill in Leek, Staffordshire – a Grade II listed building dating to 1860, derelict since 2007, and notable chiefly for not having been converted into fifty-five flats despite a planning application lodged in 2019 – was substantially consumed by fire late on Friday evening. Six engines attended. One hundred and eighteen calls were received. An eighteen-year-old local gentleman is presently assisting the constabulary with their enquiries on suspicion of arson. This Author observes that a derelict mill of such venerable age, left untouched for nearly two decades whilst developers and councillors debated its fate, has rather resolved the question of its future in the most definitive manner available to it.
Finally, a dispatch of peculiar timeliness given that today is a Saturday – that day upon which, in former times, the nation’s youth would don aprons and earn their first honest shilling. Youth unemployment has now reached its highest point in a decade, and young people of sixteen and seventeen find themselves roundly ignored by employers who prefer candidates with experience, thus neatly ensuring that no such experience shall ever be acquired. The circularity of this logic is, This Author confesses, almost admirable. One seventeen-year-old reports applying repeatedly online and hearing nothing; another calls the prospect of a part-time post “sort of impossible.” One business owner in Winchester stands as a glowing exception, employing teenagers and finding them energetic and committed. One hopes the rest of the commercial world might, on this fine Saturday, take note.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.