My daughter currently has chicken pox so I’ve been doing some on-line research, mainly to see when the contagious period ends. Having previously had it myself (unfortunately as an adult) I was interested in the connection with shingles.
I knew that you can only get shingles if you have previously had chicken pox, as shingles is caused by re-emergence of the chicken pox (varicella) virus which has lain dormant in your body, but I had recently been told that exposure to chicken pox can trigger an outbreak of shingles. This is not so and I was interested to discover from the NHS Direct website that exposure to chicken pox actually gives you a booster vaccination against shingles:
If the chickenpox vaccine were to be added to the list of childhood vaccinations, it is feared that there would be a greater number of cases of shingles in adults, until the vaccination was given to the entire population.
This is because adults who have had chickenpox as a child are less likely to have shingles in later life if they have been exposed occasionally to the chickenpox virus (for example by their children). This is because the exposure acts as a booster vaccine.
and the trigger for shingles is basically a weakening of the immune system, allowing the virus to re-emerge.
I’ve received a flyer from Sky to upgrade to their Sky HD box. The outside of the flyer looks promising:
Seventy five quid – not bad and possibly a price-point at which it’s worth upgrading, but once you open up the mailshot they hit you with the sting: £60 ‘set-up’ fee.
Now when I moved house, I had no problem unplugging at the old address and plugging in at the new address. The only difference with an upgrade to a HD box will be a registration stage – pressing a couple of buttons. If it’s possible to set up a home broadband router by yourself, why can’t Sky do the same? Also, why does it cost sixty quid, especially when new customers get it for thirty quid (another flyer arrived at the same time, asking me to introduce a friend).
They even have the cheek to say:
…but we don’t think you deserve to be rewarded for your loyalty.”
So, since the setup fee is non-optional, the real price that Sky should print is £135, but if you add on the ten pound extra per month for HD, the total cost of ownership for the first twelve months (on top of your normal, ever increasing, Sky subscription) is £255, a far cry from the headline £75.
There is a local street that is regularly used by dog walkers as a toilet for their dogs. Now before any dog owners get wound up, I know that most owners are responsible, but for some reason this particular street has a problem. The council have painted ‘no fouling’ signs on the pavements but, as you can see, some people just don’t seem to care, or maybe they have completely misunderstood the sign and think it means a designated spot for this purpose.
We’ve just had our post delivered today at ten to five! It does not appear to be a one-off either as I remember seeing the postman at a similar time earlier this week.
This is simply not acceptable. How is it possible to act on and reply to items of post that have only been delivered at the ond of the day?
Royal Mail seem to be doing everything possible to ensure that they lose their monopoly on postal deliveries
