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Who are Simon and Jude?

Why, you may justifiably ask, should the feast of Sts Simon and Jude remind me of a very popular children’s show from the mid 1950s until the 1980s called Crackerjack!? I remember watching Crackerjack hosted early on by Eamonn Andrews on black and white tv with my sister and we especially enjoyed a game which was a quiz called "Double or Drop". In this game each of three contestants was given a prize to hold for each question answered correctly but given a cabbage if they were wrong. They were out of the game if they dropped any of the items awarded or received a third cabbage. Still no idea? I’m not surprised. Well, I was a bit hazy about Sts Simon and Jude so I turned to a book on saints

With and Without the NHS

(Isaiah 65.19-22, Galatians 5.22-25) Like most of you, I was glued to the television for the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. I’d more than a passing interest in it because my husband’s godson was performing in the amazing Spectacular, in which we showcased the ‘Best of British’. What did we display with such energy, creativity and humour? Our National Health Service! The scale of the NHS organization is huge. In 2016, one million people accessed healthcare every 36 hours, and one in 25 of the population was directly employed by the NHS. My mind travels back to my being just over three years old. We lived up the hill in Infracombe, in Devon. Wartime petrol-rationing, meant that