Interesting graphic from the FT. If you really like megacities, then Europe is not the place to be:
Personally, While I enjoy country life, a commute of less than half an hour to the city is fine. I want to live near a University city when I retire, it adds so much culturally and intellectually to life.
Interesting that 300k is the lowest threshold.
After growing up in London I spent a long time living in Exeter (population now ~130k, but was a bit lower). Somewhere with a population of ~250k, maybe Plymouth, about half an Edinburgh, does not feel like a small town.
As an aside, I loathe both the countryside and small towns.
I really can't see why anyone would want to live in a place with less than about half a million people.
I have the precise opposite view to you.
I'm with rcs - for work reasons live in a quiet lane in Godalming, a small town which has supermarkets and estate agents as the most prominent businesses. There's nothing wrong with it but there was very little to do even pre-pandemic - no cinema, no night clubs, no galleries, few concerts, few ethnic restaurants, one amateur theatre. I miss Holloway a lot and hope to retire to a city in due course.
It's just as well we don't all want to live in the same place, of course!
How you septuagenarians cope without local night clubs is beyond my comprehension.
--AS
No monoculture bungalow heaven for me either. While I may never go to a nightclub again, living in a place with one does add vibrancy, and keeps the youngsters about. I like living in a mixed community of ages and classes
I've been pondering whether my present home is OK for my later years, so have been looking at various options.
I simply could not bear one of these retirement complexes, surrounded only by oldish people. I like younger people around me.
Just make sure you have space for one of these, when the stairs become too much:
That's one of my top 3 pieces of advice to self-builders. Provision for a lift or downstairs annex.
The other two are walk-in showers big enough to put a garden chair in.
And stairs that are 35 degrees not 42 degrees, which are surrepticiously relaxing and will give you an extra 5-10 years of getting upstairs when you are decrepit.
When we bought the current chez Cole we inherited a an office space in what anyone else would call a loft. With a fixed ladder up to it, and although Mrs C is making noises about moving the assorted piles of paper and files which I call a study downstairs I'm still managing to climb upon and down said ladder, although I'm not always as quick as once upon a time.
Two hours later the hospital phoned — my mother was ready for discharge and needed to be picked up now, even though she still had Covid. The nurse on the phone suggested that I should order her a taxi, since “taxi drivers don’t know if their passengers have coronavirus anyway”. I drove to the hospital and picked her up.
we didn’t know how full the hospital was going to end up, so how could we turn seriously unwell patients away at the door because we hadn’t been able to discharge Mrs Jones back to her care home with a mild case? Yet we did this for some time even after we knew what was happening as a result.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
I was not reacting to the EMA tweet, but to your post.
OK, I'll talk you through it, gently, one more time
We are managing global public opinion - which is faced by a pandemic which is killing millions. We also know that vaccine skepticism is a huge problem, across the world, but especially in Europe, where the virus is rampant, right now.
We ALSO know that we have a cheap, excellent, easily used vaccine, made not for profit, which is safe and effective, and will save thousands of lives and millions of hospitalisations. This vaccine has been the subject of almost-farcical smearing (by senior and stupid European politicians - eg president of France E Macron saying it is "quasi ineffective in the old").
Our job is to reassure the people that this vaccine is SAFE and EFFECTIVE (which all the data says it IS), but without lying, because lying would be bad.
The only question mark over this vaccine is about 30 cases of a not-that-fatal thrombosis out of SEVENTEEN MILLION INJECTIONS
The equation is clear. You tell the anxious, waiting people that this vaccine is safe, and effective. That's all. You don't lie. You just give the bald truth.
For those that are deeply anxious you provide a link where, if they want, they can read about the minuscule risks of thrombosis, 30 out of 17 million. Few will bother. The vast majority will be reassured.
What you don't do is say there are RISKS of BLOODCLOTS in your single most important tweet, thus alarming half the planet and fuelling all the antivaxxers in existence. Utterly stupid.
Here endeth your lesson.
Blimey. Aren’t you the guy who complains about over prolix headers ?
I’d add, briefly, that it is simply not the function of regulatory agencies to do PR for medical treatments. It’s governments and health authorities who have failed, massively, on that score.
What it is about is deploying an extremely short piece of text, to get across the key message. The person who wrote the Tweet chose to spend a large proportion of it reiterating why the vaccine was considered dangerous, not why it should be considered safe. Whether that was intentional (to stay on message and not make member states look foolish) or unintentional, it was inapposite.
As an aside, I loathe both the countryside and small towns.
I really can't see why anyone would want to live in a place with less than about half a million people.
I have the precise opposite view to you.
I'm with rcs - for work reasons live in a quiet lane in Godalming, a small town which has supermarkets and estate agents as the most prominent businesses. There's nothing wrong with it but there was very little to do even pre-pandemic - no cinema, no night clubs, no galleries, few concerts, few ethnic restaurants, one amateur theatre. I miss Holloway a lot and hope to retire to a city in due course.
It's just as well we don't all want to live in the same place, of course!
How you septuagenarians cope without local night clubs is beyond my comprehension.
--AS
No monoculture bungalow heaven for me either. While I may never go to a nightclub again, living in a place with one does add vibrancy, and keeps the youngsters about. I like living in a mixed community of ages and classes
The idea that small towns and the countryside is "monocultural" is complete bollocks. It's a pompous superiority that's simply asserted by the sneering Mets.
My town is surrounded by nurseries, schools and colleges, with children of all ages. The community is mixed and of all ages and, yes, classes too. There are vibrant, dynamic and modern rural businesses all around us in the fields, and start ups in the towns. People are proud of their town, and rightly so.
Stay in your Labour addled cities, filled with decay and sullen noisy filthy urbanity. We don't want you here.
Your prejudice is showing. I made no mention of ethnicity, though you did of ethnic restaurants.
My preference is for mixed communities of ages, interests and classes, I like both arts cinema and football, for example. For me the ideal place to live has people like me and lots of people unlike me. I don't like segregation.
I was responding to Nick Palmer saying there were no ethnic restaurants, dipstick. Not you.
That's your prejudice showing. Not mine.
How do you manage to be apoplectic so early in the morning?
No one seems to hate their countrymen as much as a supposed patriot.
You accused me (totally baselessly) of being prejudiced against ethnicities.
FWIW, my town has a gallery, a museum, a cinema, restaurants of all cuisines (Turkish, Chinese, Indian, Thai, Italian etc), and a theatre. It also has a steam railway. It has Jane Austen's House. It has lovely country pubs, fantastic outside forests, adventure parks, rivers, ponds, biking trails, castles, old forts, stately homes, stunning landscapes all around it - I can explore our rich heritage at leisure - and I can get to beaches and the sea easily. I can do outside adventure sports. I can sit on a hill or beach by myself, and just think. Most of all I have space, peace and freedom.
If I wanted to do the Natural History museum, "see a show" or go clubbing (pushing 40 with kids, that's difficult) I'll simply get a train into London for the evening - or for a weekend mini break - as I would for any other big city.
Doesn't mean I'd want to live in the ghastly place.
FWIW, my town has a gallery, a museum, a cinema, restaurants of all cuisines (Turkish, Chinese, Indian, Thai, Italian etc), and a theatre. It also has a steam railway. It has Jane Austen's House. It has lovely country pubs, fantastic outside forests, adventure parks, rivers, ponds, biking trails, castles, old forts, stately homes, stunning landscapes all around it - I can explore our rich heritage at leisure - and I can get to beaches and the sea easily. I can do outside adventure sports. I can sit on a hill or beach by myself, and just think. Most of all I have space, peace and freedom.
If I wanted to do the Natural History museum, "see a show" or go clubbing (pushing 40 with kids, that's difficult) I'll simply get a train into London for the evening - or for a weekend mini break - as I would for any other big city.
Doesn't mean I'd want to live in the ghastly place.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Notts is Nottingham City plus other Councils of around 100k each. Certainly here - North Notts - I get the impression that there is very much a local loyalty.
I would *detest* being run from Nottingham, 20 miles away - because I would be surprised if they gave a toss about us. They are horribly incompetent for some things, and barmy, self-obsessed control freaks in many areas - wasting 10s of millions.
Some strategic stuff - yes. But daily life - God, no. I'd take part in a Civil War to prevent that.
Suspect Derbyshire is similar. Running the Peaks from Derby, or Derby City from Matlock would be bizarre.
At a pinch you could split into maybe 3 areas.
Mansfield as a North Notts administrive centre would make sense. Not Newark, it's smaller than Worksop. What you'd do with Rushcliffe or Broxtowe I'm not sure, everywhere else fits in mind.
Comments
After growing up in London I spent a long time living in Exeter (population now ~130k, but was a bit lower). Somewhere with a population of ~250k, maybe Plymouth, about half an Edinburgh, does not feel like a small town.
we didn’t know how full the hospital was going to end up, so how could we turn seriously unwell patients away at the door because we hadn’t been able to discharge Mrs Jones back to her care home with a mild case? Yet we did this for some time even after we knew what was happening as a result.
Funnily enough I don't take kindly to that.
Think more carefully before posting next time.
Rushcliffe would rather move to the moon.