(no subject)

"The work and pensions secretary, David Blunkett, today urged hundreds of thousands of people on incapacity benefit to stop watching daytime TV and start looking for work."

http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,11499,1588833,00.html

"Mr Blunkett said getting back to work "will overcome depression and stress a lot more than people sitting at home watching daytime television"."

This hardly needs comment, but I think we can now safely say that he's enthusiastically following the Tory^WNew Labour tradition of bashing the unemployed, the poor, the sick, the old, the young, and the abnormal in the hope of getting a quick boost in the polls, on the basis that we wouldn't vote for him anyway.

A plague of mermaids

So. The mermaid has come to town. And the good coffeeshop - the small friendly one, with the comfy sofas and the acoustic evenings and CDs by local bands playing all day - has closed down. Vagabonds, it was called - not only did they do good coffee, but most times it was a good, happy crowd of young people, and the local special needs school used to take their students on a trip out there every so often. (The management had offered them all-day happy hour prices.)