"Every sperm is sacred..."

Now that Lady Bracknell has got your attention via the simple medium of quoting from one of the Monty Python team's more satirical musical numbers, she feels she ought in fairness to come clean (so to speak) and admit that she should really have misquoted the line to read, "Every spine is sacred". Except that she is not convinced that doing so in the title of this post would have drawn the eye of quite so many readers.....

To business. The good people at the Back Care charity have been "trawling through international research to gather and assess all the important facts and figures about the growing problem of back pain in children and how to tackle it". They are persuaded that part of the problem lies with the standard of furniture used in the nation's schools.

Lady Bracknell's personal opinion is that, while school furniture is undoubtedly a factor in the incidence of back pain in the young, the major causes are rather more likely to lie with the fact that children spend many hours hunched in one position over computer games at a time when their bones are still growing, and no longer "play out" with their little chums. She rather doubts that the orthopaedic standard of school furnishings has dropped so significantly over the last few decades as to be deemed solely responsible for all musculo-skeletal problems in pupils.

That said, however, Lady Bracknell is happy to support any initiative which might serve to prevent any of the children of today spending decades in chronic pain. She is only too well aware from her own experiences over the last sixteen years that chronic pain is no joke.

The Back Care people are asking readers of their website to send a virtual postcard to the Rt Hon Jacqui Smith MP, Minister of State for schools, to encourage her to meet them and discuss their proposals. Should any of the readers of this humble blog feel moved to do so, they can find the postcard here.