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Sports Review of the year 2019

Gareth Thomas is sluicing through horizontal rain and lashing winds on a 500-mile errand to deliver this year’s SPOTY trophy to Aberdeen. Epic stuff, raising serious dosh for some fantastic Sport Relief projects. I think they’ve missed a trick, though: stick a pizza hot-box on the back of his quattrocycle and surely it’s a Deliveroo sponsorship opportunity? Oven-ready, you might say. You can have that one, Boris - hope it blisters your lips.    I’m not really here to give more ether-space to BoJo’s self-serving deceit. Instead I have an overwhelming need to shed the lead-lined cloak of despair that’s been draped over my shoulders since Thursday. Time to lighten the mood. Gareth’s journey reminds me that this has been a superb year of sport. One that’s worth a personal reflection here – albeit with less glamour and glitz than the Gary and Gabby show - because I won’t be lucky enough to enjoy another as much as this for a long time to come.  Cricket is the only place to start. S

#Letstalkaboutmentalhealth

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Credit: Natural Health News  My clever, sassy, witty, vibrant, sociable, warm, feisty, feminist, artistic, beautiful Daughter No 2 has been diagnosed with Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder. She rang me after her Adult Mental Health Services appointment in tears.  I was sipping a cappuccino in Marks and Spencers which went cold before I finished it. I muttered something about “it’s only a label”, and “this is still a really new area of medicine”, but the truth was I didn’t know very much about the term.  Mrs A had a similar phone conversation at about the same time. We weren’t expecting this diagnosis. Neither was Daughter No 2. Her mental ill health had become more apparent over the preceding year and she had been seen, in hap-hazard fashion, by the county Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service, known as CAMHS. As we did, Daughter No 2 believed – hoped – that the anxiety, depression, panic attacks, recklessness and manic behaviour which were afflicting her