If you cared about teenagers' mental health, you'd be campaigning for more skate-parks and cycle-paths, subsidised music courses and access to sports-centres, rather than moaning about smartphones.

Hopefully final thought, I do think that the centre left discourse on this has fallen into a weird sort of conservatism.

Sorry, but I'm not going to stop shopping at large supermarkets or try and buy everything in person because I don't have the time or the money to do so! Most people don't.

(I attended a state school but had a lot of private music tuition as even 20 years ago music teachers were leaving the county peripatetic service to concentrate on private schools and private pupils.)

Which is to say: music education available to kids attending the normal schools that >95% attend has really got much worse in the last 20 years, particularly because county councils stopped spending on it.

Would prefer council spending went on this, if it were to be improved.

But it could be that I just don't understand social prescribing.

I am also an elitist (?) about music: there is a major difference in the effect on your life of being a good singer since you were a kid and being brought up in a particular tradition versus joining a rock choir in later life.

One more: closure of bank branches.

My recent personal experience is that even if non-CBD city branches aren't closed, the customer functions in these branches are diminishing as staff turnover and new staff aren't as comprehensibly trained.

Cf. train ticket office destaffing.

Yes! Same.

Tesco online is now so bad that I am finding it difficult to buy tooth care items (like toothbrushes) from them. They also appear to be getting quite Google-like in stopping product lines.

This is mostly about supermarkets I guess. Now to work.

- Lidl management is incredible and impressive, example: they have the best pedestrian access of any supermarket I visit both based on location and organisation of the car park, cf. Waitrose is super chaotic.

- Tesco online now has an Amazon-style market place since midway thru 2025, the more Amazon-like it gets the worse the customer experience gets for me anyway, this is after improvements that improved my experience greatly (they got Ocado-style picking robots circa 2023 I think)

- pharmacy is very interesting to me, Lloyds totally exited all their UK business in 2023 (bricks + mortar and their online business), pharmacies have radically changed how they operate

... to changing market conditions.

On internet shopping, we need to talk about how cheap delivery is in the UK due to our shit labour laws. Online shopping SHOULD NOT be cheaper and it wouldn't be if delivery drivers were paid properly and firms paid the full social cost of their activities.