SOSA is a charity in its own right, running weekly sessions in athletics, basketball, boccia, swimming, equestrian, and a multi-sport taster sessions. As the picture shows, I went to see one of the athletics sessions at Westminster Lodge.

But I could have gone to basketball at Loreto School, boccia at Nicholas Breakspear, equestrian at the Oaklands College Smallford campus, multi-sports at Harpenden Leisure Centre, or swimming at either Harpenden pool or Townsend School.

They’re also getting involved in a community allotment in the Mentmore Road allotments in Cottonmill.

So it’s entirely my own fault that I knew so little of their activities before one of the parents contacted me.  Frankly I had confused it with the better known and higher profile Paralympics movement for physically disabled people.

I was really impressed with the enthusiasm and commitment of SOSA’s volunteer coaches, the parents, and the very small professional staff.  The trouble is that their finances are on a knife-edge.  Their chief funding comes out of various “pots” in the county council budget.  So they are very vulnerable in the current public spending climate.  They’ve already taken a hit this year but have managed to continue by paring everything to the bone.  If there are more cuts next year, they would find it very difficult to continue without a fairy godmother.

It was clear to me how much pleasure the participants gained from the various activities.  It provides an invaluable outlet and confidence builder.  So congratulations to Deloittes in St Albans who provide help in both money and kind, including a lot of staff involvement, and the network of parents and friends who slog away at fund-raising.  And a plea to the county council to do its level best to protect this little corner of the Big Society.

If you want more information on the Special Olympics movement, you can find out more here.

PS I didn’t know what Boccia was either.  So this is what it says on the Boccia Federation website:  Boccia (pronounced ‘Bot-cha’) is a Paralympic sport introduced in 1984.  It has no Olympic counterpart.  Athletes throw, kick or use a ramp to propel a ball onto the court with the aim of getting closest to a ‘jack’ ball. It is designed specifically for athletes with a disability affecting locomotor functions.  It is played indoors on a court similar in size to a badminton court.

The aim of the game is to get closer to the jack than your opponent.  The jack ball is white and is thrown first.  One side has six red balls and the other has six blue balls.  The balls are leather containing plastic granules so they don’t bounce but will still roll.  The side whose ball is not closest to the jack throws until they get a ball closest or until they run out of balls.  Once all the balls have been thrown one side receives points for every ball they have closer to the jack than their opponents closest ball.

So I hope that’s clear.

Inflation according to the RPI formula has gone negative – but that’s not the case for old people who don’t have mortgages and spend disproportionately on food and energy. Later on the same Budget Day afternoon I spoke to an elederly resident in Chiswell Green. He hasn’t seen a rise in his private pension for eight years.

We don’t yet know what the long-term impact will be of “quantitative easing” (printing money to you and me). The cynic in me says that whatever party gets into government, there will be the age-old temptation to allow inflation to reduce the real cost of the eye-watering levels of national debt. That is bad news for every pensioner who does not benefit from guaranteed index-linking.

But the biggest disaster of this economic smash is that it condemns Britain to yet more decades of shoddy and under-invested public services. For it will always be the frontline which bears the brunt of so-called efficiency savings.Partly this will be because within the overall envelope of much lower planned increases in public expenditure, a much bigger slice of taxpayers money will need to be used to pay huge interest bills on ballooning public debt and to pay benefits to far greater numbers of unemployed people.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies calculates that spending departments will face annual budget cuts of 2.3 percent. Hands up anyone who believes this won’t result in more schools with leaky roofs, more unimproved council houses, less money for crucial medicines and treatments in the NHS, and more holes in our roads.

That is why we need to have a proper debate about which areas of public expenditure need major changes and reductions rather than simply salami-slicing everything. Vince Cable has highlighted the increasingly absurd ambition that 50 percent of people should go to university. Can we really afford to go on playing world policeman? What do we do about publoc sector pensions?

It is certainly not a time for Conservative political point-scoring and gloating at Mr Brown’s discomfort – the Year 13s of Townsend School deserve better.