It’s Annual Review of Competence Progression (ARCP) time for most medical trainees at this time of year. This is where a panel reviews how we’re doing, and how our training is progressing. Most trainees these days have e-portfolios to collect evidence for these annual reviews, but in Public Health in the Northern Deanery, we still use paper… which requires literally hundreds of physical signatures from supervisors, and other numbers from other people, which can make co-ordination something of a challenge!

This picture shows my portfolio carefully balanced on top of my car, as I prepared to hand it in to the Deanery’s office. I’m glad to finally have it finished for another year!

This is Bottle of Notes, a 1993 steel and enamel sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen which forms text from Captain Cook’s journals into a white bottle; a blue note inside is formed of a line of poetry by one of the artists. It’s about 35 feet tall, and leans at a considerable angle. It was forged a little further north in Hebburn.

Since the bottle’s 1993 installation, mima – the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art – has been built behind it. It opened in 2007, but is (perhaps unfortunately?) best known for hosting Jeremy Clarkson et al’s Top Gear exhibition of automotive art in 2009.

This slightly broken bin has appeared in the road not too far from my house… how it appeared here, I really don’t know! Perhaps it’s a relative of these!

This very distinctive building in Newcastle’s Exhibition Park was originally a temporary pavilion – a “palace of the arts” – in the 1929 North East Coast Exhibition. It proved so distinctive and popular that it was retained and used for a variety of purposes over the years. It’s now Grade II listed.

It’s most recent use was as a Military Vehicle Museum, but the deteriorating state of a temporary building that had far outlasted its designed lifespan led to its closure in 2006. Since then, it’s future had looked uncertain, as the abandoned building deteriorated more and more.

Yet, in May, its future was secured after the building was sold to Shepherd Offshore Ltd who reportedly intend to renovate the building into a museum of horse-drawn carriages and vintage vehicles. It’s great news that the building is to be saved, but I do wonder quite how popular a museum with those contents will be…!

These are the woods in the Tyne Riverside Country Park, as seen during a very sunny walk earlier today.

But, since, everyone’s very excited about the Olympics today, I also thought I should feature something vaguely Olympic related. So here’s my photograph of the Olympic motto from Eau Claire in Calgary, as seen in 2007 during my elective:

The London 2012 Olympic Torch relay reaches its conclusion tonight with the Olympic Opening Ceremony. Back in March, Max Fisher wrote a great article for The Atlantic looking at the relay’s Nazi origins. If you didn’t read it then, what better time than now?

I’ve mentioned Newcastle’s quayside kittiwakes before – they’re very controversial because although ornithologists argue that their presence is valuable, they make a heck of a mess around the Tyne Bridge, on which they nest. The hanging sign outside this quayside bar provides a graphic demonstration of the unpleasant mess they liberally spread.

I forgot my photo-a-day yesterday – oops – so here’s a picture of The Shard that I took earlier in the week. Little-known facts about The Shard include the fact that it’s tall, it’s located in London, and it has a lot of glass on it.

I really like reading books about other people’s jobs. I don’t quite know why I’m attracted to this type of book, but I almost always really enjoy them. So, since this was an Amazon best-seller, I thought it was worth a try. Unfortunately, this proved to be an exception to the rule.

Herrring gives an account of working as an IT officer onboard a number of cruise ships. He talks a little about his job, though these sections quickly become repetitive as he describes the same processes on several ships. He tries a bit of amateur anthropology as well, drawing conclusions as earth-shattering as discovering that people from the same country tend to stick together, as do those with the same job. But, perhaps surprisingly, the bulk of this book is about his sex life.

Now, I have nothing against books like this discussing sex. Clearly, to Herring, the the promiscuity that he and his fellow crew experience during their time working onboard cruise ships was a large part of the experience, and so it would be most unusual not to discuss it. But this goes far beyond that: this isn’t discussion of the general point, this is bizarre description of individual sexual encounters.

In fact, he times a number of the sexual encounters and reports their length to the second. As someone reading to find out about other working lifestyles, I can honestly say that I have precisely no interest in the fact that his sexual encounter with a youth counsellor from South Africa lasted only 91 seconds, nor that his encounter with a Lithuanian lasted two minutes and three seconds. Frankly, I’m amazed that anyone was interested enough to publish these sections!

The doctor in me is a little bit disappointed too that massively excessive alcohol consumption is discussed throughout with little regard paid to the consequences. There is a brief description of someone who has a physical dependence on alcohol, but little discussion of the wider problem, and no mention at all of any long-term negative effects of daily excessive consumption.

There is also a frankly bizarre chapter on booking cruises which appears to have been sponsored by a cruise provider, but isn’t clearly marked as such, which is a bit disappointing.

I don’t want to give the impression that this book is all bad. I did make it to the end of the book. There are some revealing insights in there. There are a few moments of humour. But my overall impression was one of this being a deeply bizarre and flawed book. The content could probably be edited and re-worked into a reasonable feature for a Sunday newspaper magazine – but in its current form, I really don’t feel able to recommend this book.

The Truth About Cruise Ships is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

This is a bit of water shining in the morning sun in Hyde Park. I think it’s the Serpentine, but it might be Long Water – my understanding of the divisions of Hyde Park’s waterways would be exaggerated by calling it limited.

Anyway, something else has occurred to me as I’ve wandered round London these past few days – with so many sealed post boxes, where are our Olympic visitors supposed to post their official London 2012 postcards? Are there special boxes inside the venues?