en-uk Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:37:29 GMT Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd. custserv@timesonline.co.uk http://www.timesonline.co.uk Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:16:42 GMT Newspapers 144 21 http://www.timesonline.co.uk http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,116979,00.gif Libby Purves Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:01:00 GMT 2010-01-31T09:53:37Z Up and about, are you? Off to work? Congratulations! Tens of thousands are not, according to a sorrowful report from the employment law consultant Peter Mooney. The first Monday in February is apparently the peak day for employees calling in sick, many of them fraudulently. It’s dark and chilly; Christmas debt still hurts, Easter is far away. So in come the calls, croaking and faint even if only claiming a sprained knee, and down goes productivity. Libby Purves Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:01:00 GMT 2010-02-01T12:07:40Z Last week three criminal convictions provoked uncomfortable meditations on parenthood. Unlike David Cameron, I have no taste for diagnosing Broken Britain: the Edlington horror displayed only the familiar curse of drunken, drugged parents and the equally familiar inadequacy of some local authorities (if you must draw a governance moral out of Doncaster, it is that calling yourself an “inter-agency forum” and adopting a trendy present-participle — as in “Safeguarding Children Board” — doesn’t necessarily make you efficient.) The upbringing of the boy torturers in South Yorkshire should certainly make us think about the human truths of parenthood; but so should the other two cases. One is the harrowing tale of Frances Inglis, who “with love in her heart” conned her way into the nursing home where her 22-year-old son lay in a coma and gave him a lethal injection. She had tried to do it before, soon after the accident, and been given bail for attempted murder and banned from visiting him. Inglis’s maternal desire to end something she thought unbearable has met with much compassion; but the judge, with measured courage, identified it as murder. She got nine years. The debate on assisted suicide was reignited but is hardly appropriate: the young man could not communicate. The decision on what was best for him, up to and including death, was one his mother took alone. She believed she knew best. Libby Purves Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:01:00 GMT 2010-02-01T12:07:44Z The Unite union has removed its threat of bringing BA cabin crew out on strike over Easter “so families may make travel plans in confidence”. Clearly, in a deep-frozen recessionary winter they saw not the whites of passengers’ eyes but the mad red glow of hatred. They quailed. Libby Purves Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:01:00 GMT 2010-01-17T07:55:05Z Warm, fuzzy escapism is one honourable role of popular fiction, so Friday’s Coronation Street was justified in offering us a heart-warming medical vignette. A child had a fever; anxious divorced parents called their GP, who shortly turned up in their home, smiling, familiar, articulate and reassuring. At no point did anyone have to explain themselves repeatedly to NHS Direct “information handlers” on the phone, or wait four hours for an outsourced “provider” to send round a jetlagged foreign doctor they couldn’t understand. Nobody had to bundle the shaking child into the car to A&E, after scrabbling down the back of the sofa for change for the hospital car park.