A very serious note

A very serious note

From time to time, some of us here on Ephotozine express our thoughts about things that are not directly related to photography. And sometimes, we are roundly told off for doing so. Now the site has some clear rules about posting: I’ll add the two most useful links in a comment, as links in the body of a blog upset the system. Having looked through them, I’m delighted that they’re pretty brief, and rather nicely worded. It’s terribly common for rules to be complicated (have you ever read all of an End User Licencing Agreement, or Google’s Ts and Cs?) The most relevant item is on that says that pictures that are seen as ‘consisting entirely of a religious/political message’ will be deleted.



Some years ago, I had to read a very carefully-researched document called the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment for the town I live in. I think there's probably one for every part of England: it analyses the causes of ill health and looks at the demographics, and were produced by councils and the NHS. There’s a problem with doing this – if you find out the causes of poor health (I suspect that the official government jargon is ‘adverse health outcomes’) you really ought to do something to deal with the problems. And that’s where the problem is: a careful scientific document is, in fact, a socialist manifesto. Here’s why…

Living where I do in Walsall, I'm statistically likely to live 10 years longer than a man on the opposite side of the borough. The reasons are poor housing, education, diet, low income. If you live on a big estate, there will probably be few shops near you, and those that there are will have lower-quality and more expensive food in them. The big supermarkets with lower prices will be out of town, or at least in a nicer part of town. That’s fine if you’ve got a car, or can afford a taxi. But if you lack money, even the bus far may be too much.



'Lifestyle' is a trendy word: but it's about all the things that make it up. If you want to improve health and life expectancy, end poverty. As Churchill put it, there's no finer investment that putting milk into babies. I strongly suspect that there’s a similar differential everywhere: though there may not be the strong geographical divide there is here (it's based on the prevailing winds: the middle-class housing is upwind of where the smokestack factories used to be: the big council estates are all round those areas. Poor people walked to work, wealthier people caught the tram...) And there’s a second shocker among general statistics: wealthier people not only live 10 years longer, but they live 20 years longer in good health – fit, active and relatively untroubled by ageing.

Ideally, I’d illustrate this with some street images of the parts of town that I’ve been talking about, but the present lockdown makes it relatively irresponsible to drive around town just for the sake of some pictures. So one side of the story in the pictures, only…