LOCAL parents have slammed fresh reports that people with learning disabilities have been given do not resuscitate orders during the second wave of the pandemic. Mencap, a charity for people with a learning disability, said it had received reports in January of people with learning disabilities being told they would not be resuscitated if they were taken ill with Covid-19. It comes despite the Care Quality Commission saying in December that inappropriate Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNACPR) notices had caused potentially avoidable deaths last year. DNACPRs are usually made for people who are too frail to benefit from CPR, but Mencap said some seem to have been issued for people simply because they had a learning disability.
Many people have never had a hard time finding a hairstylist. Indeed, there s a large swath of the population that has never seen a hair appointment as anything other than a blissful experience, with the exception of the occasional bad cut.
But for some predominantly women with highly textured hair, who tend to be Black and brown the salon experience can feel racially divided and unwelcoming. Historically, hair has been, as with many things, viewed in terms of Black and white: A sleeker texture was thought to be the domain of white hair, while kinks and curls aka highly textured hair was seen as Black. Salons and hair-care brands emerged to serve each clientele and, even though the rest of the country has (at least officially) been desegregated, salons nationwide have remained widely separated by this distinction in client hair types.
So we have a wilfully low-key NYE. It involves just the two of us. We drive up to the servo early, and get a bucket of KFC. We come back to our house and â under Christmas lights that we keep up specifically for this purpose â we hose our balcony. All the detritus of the year is washed away. Then we put garlands on our heads, light sparklers, listen to the countdown and take a couple of seconds to hear the cheer go up in the air above our little country town. We do indulge an annual bacchanal but thatâs come to be Burnâs Night (25 January) where haggis, swords, kilts, Buckfast and our friends hollering poetry in Scots furnish a more appropriately theatrical start to the year.