A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The final post of a series of fifty-two.

Yes, this is a day early, but I’m starting something new tomorrow, and it would seem weird to finish a 2022 series on the first day of 2023.

So, we’ve finally limped to the end of the year of two monarchs, three Prime Ministers and four Chancellors.

And while the NHS is on its knees—or perhaps having collapsed—the Department of Health and Social Care has seen four Secretaries of State for Health this year, seven Ministers of State and seven Parliamentary Under Secretaries.

We can’t go on like this.

I can’t go on like this.

I had a moan about the Council cutting down trees a few weeks ago, so I feel it’s only proper to give credit where it’s due: I counted fifteen newly planted trees in green spaces on my way to work recently. We can but hope there will be more next year.

This article in Le Monde about EU nutrition labelling warmed my heart. It’s extremely difficult to summarise the complexity of the nutritional value of a foodstuff in a single letter. Any straightforward formula will inevitably throw up anomalies like the olive oil discussed in the article.

Yet, that very complexity is the reason that a simple indication is worth fighting for. It’s good to see the political effort going in to making it work, and also good to see people standing their ground and thereby helping to improve the end product.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image for the prompt ‘new year fireworks above a long queue of NHS ambulances, dramatic art’ created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.