Avoid Christmas injuries.



Christmas Lights and Christmas Ornaments with Cool Light Effect by ParentingPatch

Of the 350 reported fairy light injuries, most occurred whilst decorating. Injuries include people falling while putting up the lights, children swallowing the bulbs, and people getting electric shocks and burns from faulty lights. Lights can also have fatal consequences with an alarming number of deaths caused by people watering the tree with the lights switched on.

Accidents can be avoided by ensuring your fairy lights come with a safety mark, such as the BSI Kitemark. Only use lights outdoors if they were intended for that purpose and turn them off before you go to bed at night. It is also recommended that you replace your lights every three years and keep them out of reach of children

Around 1,000 people each year suffer Christmas tree related injuries. According to RoSPA, these injuries usually occur while fixing lights, stars and decorations to the higher branches. Other injuires include pine-related eye injuries as people reached for presents.

Thinking of Presents, people often trip over toys and electric cables. Other Christmas Day accidents include people cutting themselves when they try to open presents too quickly and people accidentally stabbing themselves with scissors, which they’ve used instead of using a screwdriver, to assemble toys.



Christmas Pudding by Matt Riggott

Holiday season is a time to break with the diet and indulge. Just as long as you don’t over indulge. Hospital admissions for alcohol related accidents and injuries go through the roof as people drink 41 per cent more in December than the monthly average.

It goes without saying you should never drink and drive.

There’s also a risk from eating the festive bird. Around 30 people die from food poisoning in the UK each Christmas. 80 per cent of people wash the turkey before cooking it, spreading germs to kitchen surfaces. It also takes hours to cook a turkey properly. Undercook turkey and you could contract salmonella poisoning. And one in five of us risk food poisoning from eating turkey leftovers which have spent longer than the recommended two days in the fridge.

For advice on staying safe see
http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Healthychristmas/Pages/Christmasinjuries.aspx

As always, please visit my websites at http://www.invitation2events.co.uk and http://www.itmgames.co.uk and www.solvethemurder.co.uk
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Invitation to contemplate: Survivors party time!

Invitation to contemplate: Survivors party time!:  The world did not end on December 21st 2012. Time to party? Ideas that the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world were being deb...

Survivors party time!

 The world did not end on December 21st 2012. Time to party?

Ideas that the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world were being debunked in the run up to the Apocalypse. Scholars were saying that the calendar only marked the end of the 13th baktun cycle. Geoffrey Braswell, professor of Maya archaeology, is quoted in Dallas News, as saying “There are two monuments that mention this date, the end of this cycle of the 13th baktun. But there is a very long inscription at [the archaeological site] Palenque that talks about events further in the future, and that would seem to suggest that the Maya did not think the world would end.” Indeed, the ancient Maya had even larger cycles of time than the baktun, with some inscriptions that survive pointing to years as far ahead in our Gregorian calendar as 4772.

 

So the mayan prophecy is consigned to history with a lot of other end of the world predictions.

Remember people being worried about Y2K and the Millennium Bug back at the start of the century? The Millennium Bug was thought to be a threat to technology as computers reset to “00”, implying the year was 1900 instead of 2000. The confusion was expected to lead to errors in software, causing banking systems and weapon systems to fail. Planes were expected to fall from the sky. The crisis would lead to chaos around the planet. However, at midnight on January 1, 2000, the world celebrated the new millennium without any chaos.

More recently, American radio host Harold Camping predicted the apocalypse would come on October 21 2011. However, he had also predicted the “Rapture” would take place on May 21, 2011, when God’s people would be assumed into heaven leaving the rest of humanity behind on Earth to await their doom. Neither event occured.

This is similar in nature to the prediction by Chicago housewife Dorothy Martin that the world was to end in a great flood before dawn on December 21, 1954. She convinced followers that a flying saucer from planet Clarion would rescue the true believers before the inevitable destruction of Earth.

Then there were the “Black hole” theories based on the Large Hadron Collider experiments in Geneva, Switzerland. Some people suggested that the energies set free by the controlled collisions of particles at very high speeds would form a black hole powerful enough to consume Earth and all life on it. However, high-profile studies show that there are no such dangers associated with the experiments.

So,why not gather some friends and throw a survivors party? You know you want to.

Mystery Parties and Murder Mystery Parties are available from www.itmgames.co.uk and, for a limited time, for each full price game bought before 24th December 2012, you get a £10 voucher towards a second game.

Visit ITM Games and Invitation To Events for Games details.

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Invitation to contemplate: Safe Drive Stay Alive

Invitation to contemplate: Safe Drive Stay Alive:     The Safe Drive Stay Alive campaign aims to influence behaviour and attitude on the roads, by targeting new and pre-drivers in ...

Safe Drive Stay Alive

 

 

The Safe Drive Stay Alive campaign aims to influence behaviour and attitude on the roads, by targeting new and pre-drivers in an emotive and hard-hitting way.

This is a road safety campaign partnership that links local councils and their local emergency services.

Safiah Ishfaq organised a three day event for Waltham Forest council and invited local schools and colleges to send audiences. Kiss FM’s DJ Big Ted welcomed the teenagers to a presentation of “Safe Drive Stay Alive” at the Chingford Assembly halls this week.

Yes there is a film, but this is not another boring road safety film. This is an interactive presentation where members of the emergency services and people affected by traffic accidents tell the audience what it is really like to be involved in a traffic accident.

The film begins with a couple of young girls accepting a lift from two boys who have been drinking and the group suffering a horrific crash. It is interspersed by talks from people telling their experiences of traffic accidents.

The first is Sharon Saudy, a paramedic who tells about a crash at the Billet roundabout.  “It was carnage,” she said. “The driver was going 80mph. He lost control and slammed the car into the concrete roundabout. The man in the back had had his bike across his lap. He was decapitated by his own bike.” The film continues with the four characters trapped in the car, waiting to be rescued by the emergency services.

A firefighter from Walthamstow graphically described attending a collision where the car involved had been trapped on its side between railings and a lamppost. Then PC Jason Clauson, who’s  job it is to inform families a loved one has died, tells how “My first fatal was when I was sitting in traffic and a drunk driver hit a car side on and it flipped over. I saw something fly out of the window. It was a seven year old girl.”

Nick Bennett told the shocked audience how he had been driving without a seat belt 10 years ago when he tried to overtake a car and lost control. He had a head-on collision with a truck which nearly cost him his life. He awoke three and a half weeks later in hospital, having suffered a brain injury. He has since lost his leg due to his accident. He said: “My message is please, please, please don’t think that you can drive dangerously without suffering the consequences. Take a look at the people sitting around you. They’re your friends and they will probably be the ones to egg you on in your car to take unnecessary risks but ask yourself one question. Will those friends still come and visit you when you’re stuck in a wheelchair because mine don’t.”

The last speaker at the presentation was bereaved father, George Atkinson, who lost his 16 year old daughter when a car mounted a pavement ploughing into her.

The film ends with a roundup of the outcomes for the four victims.
The audience are then free to leave, passing the participants on their way out. The experience is so hard hitting they leave in near silence. A few are in tears.

As PC Clauson said, their parents would rather get a call from them at 2 am asking to be collected, than a call from him at 2 am saying they had been killed.