Many secretly like nothing better than a boom, while complaining bitterly about the inevitable aftermath.Low and steady inflation will take some new ways of thinking too, for there is no hiding behind general inflationary price rises any more It has become very hard to increase prices at all. Some manufacturers are having to get used to continuous price cuts and quality improvements. Negotiations with employees have also changed character.Some business people and union leaders will agree privately that it makes no sense to keep demanding lower interest rates. Others think the Bank has sacrificed industry unnecessarily on the altar of stability.The critics should note that the new regime is showing every sign of achieving what it was supposed to: low inflation with stable growth and interest rates.. FOR THE past 13 years, Kathleen McGaughey, a social worker, and her sister Frieda, a nurse, have owned and run a 16-bed residential care home in Bolton called Balgowney. After years of struggling to make ends meet, they have decided to call it a day. Their local authority no longer has the funds to place elderly people in their care, they say.

Unable to pay the upkeep or the mortgage, the sisters are selling, forcing residents to find alternative accommodation. For two ladies in their nineties, residents since the home opened, the upheaval is immense.
Balgowney is by no means the exception. Hundreds of homes, most of them small, privately owned businesses, are being forced to close this year, in what Paul Saper, of the healthcare consultants Laing & Buisson, describes as the annus horribilis of the care homes sector.In theory, care homes should be a growth, even boom, industry. Britain’s ageing population should be creating growing demand for residential care.But for those unable to provide for themselves, the story is a very different one. Local authorities are cutting back at a time when costs are rising steeply because of a combination of the minimum wage, the working time directive and a national shortage of trained nurses. Figures from the Independent Healthcare Association reveal that the sector employs 550,000 staff to care for its 500,000 residents.The consensus is that at least 40 per cent of Britain’s 20,000 nursing and residential homes will face serious difficulties over the next 12 months, threatening thousands of jobs and putting billions of pounds of banking loans at risk.Only substantial homes with minimal borrowings will survive, Mr Saper predicts. LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI is intrigued by Britain’s search for a new Poet Laureate.

When things aren’t right in your house you can’t face the world. People would ring up and ask “Is that Mr Edmonds?” I hated it as well. I had just been given this lucrative publishing deal, and Owen wasn’t working.Owen took a part-time Christmas job at Dillons, earning peanuts. Harry was born about this time, and automatically I started looking after the baby. Soon afterwards she discovered she was pregnant, and they decided Owen should look after the baby. “We would assume that the individual making the inquiry was the individual indicated as the designated individual.”"Just a minute, please.” I thought for a minute. I explained this to the social security man when he came back on the line.

My son’s high school track team practices in winter on the college’s indoor track. The local university, Dartmouth, is a private school and quite exclusive – it’s one of the Ivy League colleges, like Harvard and Yale – but you would never guess it.None of its grounds are off limits to us Indeed, much of it is open to the community. Now when I see him I ask him about his kids.It shows itself in other ways, too Hanover, where we live, is a college town. It’s because it’s symbolic of something more fundamental, I suppose.There is no tugging of forelocks here, you see, but a genuine universal assumption that no person is better than any other I think that’s swell My dustman calls me Bill My doctor calls me Bill My children’s headmaster calls me Bill They don’t tug for me I don’t tug for them. Together, driven by Robinson’s chauffeur, they set out house-hunting in W2 and W11.They visited two or three flats which Robinson pronounced unsuitable. As someone who knew about property, he could help him find a place. It was clear from Robinson’s tone that he would be in no hurry for repayment.Mandelson now accepted some more immediate help from Robinson.