‘Can I have one last present?’ my daughter asked earlier this week, having turned 15 and covered the kitchen floor with torn wrapping paper. ‘Can I have a sick note for PE?’
Doubtless she’d pored over that morning’s news before charging up and down the corridor at dawn to wake her parents. She must have noted that the government is planning to trial reforms of the sick note system that has been failing this country for decades.
She didn’t mention it when delightedly seeing if her squeezy pickled cucumber lamp would work (it did), or when she opened her new records (my wife having binned my several hundred, a timely few months before my daughter discovered vinyl). But she rarely asks for sick notes, or to miss school; she has the idea you shouldn’t. As habits go, this is a good one. Presume that you can generally struggle on and you generally do. There are times when we all fail and when adopting the sick role is absolutely the right choice, but it helps if doing so is very strongly not to our taste.
Across Europe, inactivity has been falling since the pandemic; in Britain it keeps climbing
William Beveridge said we must attack the giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, and Squalor:
