Last night, conscious of the way that Meg had slumped out of her wheelchair, I set to work to see how I could remedy the situation. I knew that one way or another I needed to construct a backward sloping seat but eventually I think I am going to utilise three pieces of kit that might assist. The first of these is a little triangular wedge arrangement which our domestic help had given us and I had secured inside a cushion cover. In the past, I had used this as a sort of levelling up device so that I could place a plate on Meg's knees but since her new chair and the fact that I am feeding her, it has fallen into disuse. This, for a start, is going to go underneath the swab cushion to give a degree of tilt. The second is a piece of kit which the OT's had supplied in the past but at the time, was of limited utility. It was like a small thin cushion but covered in an elasticated material that would only move in one direction but not in the other - I think the idea behind it at the time was an anti-slip device, but this is now going to be pressed into service as well. The final piece of kit is something which I adapted last night. I looked in my study and found what I was looking for which is a ring binder which, when nor filled with filing materials, assumes a triangular shape. This I then covered with the last piece I had of that elasticated stretchy type of fabric which is quite often to be found in hardware stores, and this completed my assembly of three items. Today, we are not going to go out in the wheelchair, so I am going to experiment with these three pieces of kit in various combinations to see what works best. I have also discovered a long thin ladies belt which I think I had bought for myself as a way of making sure that keys did not slip out of a back pocket and, although it sounds a little drastic, when next we go out which will be next Tuesday, I will see if this can be utilised with the existing laptop type of seatbelt to provide a belt and braces. Although I need to speak to the wheelchair people to see of a more 'professional' solution is available or, indeed, feasible then I am reasonably hopeful that these short-term fixes will do the job for me. I have consulted the Amazon website and there seems to be a good range of retaining straps available but I am still on an Amazon-avoidance type of spree and will only go down this route if all else fails. Looking on eBay, though, there is a good range of straps to prevent elderly people slipping out of wheelchairs so this must be a common problem. In all of this, I am the supreme pragmatist and 'if it works, it works' whatever the professionals might think. I did find the elasticated knee and elbow supports very useful to secure Meg's ankles before the wheelchair specialists fitted some more specialist straps so a home-made solution to Meg's slumping problems is possible,. The ultimate source of the problem, of course, is Meg's complete lack of body strength to be able to hold herself upright in the correct posture as the rest of the able-bodied population in fact do.
There was an amazing story in the Observer/Guardian yesterday morning. Britain performed worse than most other developed nations in its response to the Covid pandemic, according to an Observer analysis of international data, five years on from the first lockdown. The UK spent more money than most other countries on economic help yet still ended up with larger drops in life expectancy, more people too sick to work, huge levels of homelessness and soaring mental health problems among young people. Siva Anandaciva, director of policy at the King’s Fund think-tank, said the UK had not bounced back from Covid in the way other developed countries had. 'We haven’t seen the bounceback that other countries have. When I look at the one big global indicator of how healthy we are, which is our life expectancy, we’ve gone backwards. We’ve fallen back to levels of a decade ago, while other countries have kept motoring on in western Europe and leaving us behind. It’s a pretty damning indictment of what happened.' Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy, said inequality was 'the primary story of the pandemic. You still find that people from poorer backgrounds are more likely to have been impacted,' Shah said, adding that the rate of long Covid in the most deprived households is double that of the most wealthy. The UK spent 19.3% of gross domestic product on extra spending and forgone revenue, and gave loans worth a further 16.7%, according to the International Monetary Fund – more than almost every other developed country except Japan, Germany and Italy. Yet the return on this investment was poor. After the lockdowns ended, every other G7 nation except the US saw more adults rejoining the workforce. However, the UK, which has historically had a better than average number of people in work, saw the reverse. There has been a 0.5% increase in the number of people not working and classed as economically inactive, with about 2.7 million too sick to work. In life expectancy, one of the most fundamental measures of how a country is able to look after its people, the UK is in a worse position than most other developed countries. Women can expect to live to 82 years and 10 months, about three years less than in Spain, Australia or Italy, while men can expect to reach 79, about two years less than in the same countries, reversing more than a decade of lifespan increases. OECD figures show that, in similar countries, homelessness is static or has been falling, but it has more than doubled in England since 2010. About 45 out of every 10,000 people are either sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation.
© Mike Hart [2025]