This book had frequently been recommended to me over the years, particularly in medical circles, but somehow I’d never got around to reading it until now. John Berger’s text, accompanied by evocative photographs by Jean Mohr, paints a literary portrait of a rural doctor practising in England in the 1960s.

The book offers a fascinating, often moving insight into the life and work of Dr John Sassall, the independent-minded physician who serves his community through both home visits and work at the local hospital. Sassall emerges as a charismatic, somewhat idiosyncratic figure who embodies the traditional paternalistic notion of a doctor as a pillar of the community, deeply embedded within the social fabric of his village.

Reading an original 1960s library edition added an extra layer of reflection for me, prompting consideration of how dramatically medicine has evolved over the intervening decades, even while the central aim and values of the profession have stayed the same. The absence of today’s omnipresent healthcare bureaucracy—management structures, commissioning—is striking. Sassall operates with remarkable independence, personally determining what’s best for his patients without the layers of accountability and oversight common today. On the one hand, this autonomy clearly benefits the community when a practitioner is dedicated and insightful, as Sassall appears to be. Yet, viewed through a contemporary lens, the lack of checks and balances feels risky, particularly given Sassall’s single-handed practice. Nobody can know everything, and it’s a worry to wonder how Sassall managed patients with conditions he knew less about without evidence-based guidelines to draw upon.

Equally thought-provoking is the book’s portrayal of the doctor’s role as a confidant and central social figure. While it was common during my medical training to hear that doctors had replaced priests as the recipients of people’s innermost worries, I wonder whether that’s still true today. It seems medicine, and perhaps society itself, has moved on. Healthcare feels more transactional and commodified, further from the deeply personal, community-rooted interactions described by Berger.

A Fortunate Man provided me with much food for thought, exploring both the continuity and considerable change in the medical profession. It’s a reflective and engaging work that I’d recommend highly—not just to medical colleagues, but to anyone interested in the shifting relationships between doctors, patients, and the communities they serve.

The photo is a background detail of a photo from the book, noting the times at which smoking is permitted on the ward. It seems strikingly old-fashioned, until I remember that smoking rooms were still common is hospitals when I started my training. It’s amazing how quickly society—and our perceptions of it—can change.

Yesterday, for only the second time in my lifetime, a serving Pope died. Remarkably, I’ve been blogging long enough that I wrote about the last one, too. A couple of years ago, I wondered whether Pope Benedict XVI had reformed how a pontificate ends: it’s still centuries too early to judge, but yesterday’s events suggest that, perhaps, he didn’t.

Perhaps, in the interregnum, you’ll allow me a moment to pontificate.

It has often been said—including by me—that I’d make a great vicar. I even won the Religion Cup a few times at school. The only snag is my complete absence of faith or belief in the existence of a divine creator. There’s much that connects medicine and the priesthood, with a sympathetic ear perhaps the most important organ in both professions.

But I could never, except perhaps in the darkest nightmares, imagine being the Pope. The crushing weight of the role; the need to both harbour doubt (for faith requires doubt) and yet be completely unable to express it; the constant, all-consuming observation; the inability to have a day off. It looks a lot like psychological torture.

Whatever else he might have been or done, Francis’s ability to endure that with grace and humility marks him out as exceptional. But, of course, the Catholic Church causes a great deal of harm in the world, and Francis shares responsibility for that.

It has been revealing to see the coverage of Pope Francis’s death, if only for the way it has balanced its presentation. Figures in the news are too often presented as one-sided—‘good’ or ‘evil’—with too little grey. People contain multitudes, and their qualities can be difficult to reconcile: killer and caring professional; rapist and philanthropist; racist and creative.

Pope Francis probably contained more than most, and it is pleasing that news programmes didn’t rush to judge, as they so frequently do, but instead allowed viewers to make up their own minds… or, indeed, choose not to.

These moments of solemnity and reflection are surprisingly revealing.

What does it say about the modern approach to producing news coverage that Sky News carried a commentator talking about how healthy the Pope looked on Sunday, three minutes before they announced his death? Does asking people who have seen the same pictures as the rest of us to comment on someone’s health really have value? Does it truly shed light on anything? Is it really journalism? Is it fair—either to the commentator or the human being concerned? At least they’re never wrong for long.

And what does it say about the United States that their President offers condolences while standing next to a person wearing a rabbit costume? I dread to think, and don’t even want to speculate.

Yesterday, Wendy and I noticed that much of the news coverage was using the words ‘papacy’ and ‘pontificate’ interchangeably. So let me help out, following a quick consultation with the dictionary.

‘Papacy’ is to the Pope as ‘monarchy’ is to the King.

‘Pontificate’ is to the Pope as ‘reign’ is to the King.

No matter what you may have heard on the news, the papacy didn’t end yesterday—only a pontificate did.

I didn’t forget!

A hotel room I recently checked into had a small bookshelf, which was nice. This was one of four volumes squeezed between two unmatched bookends.

I have a vague cultural awareness of The School of Life: I enjoy and follow Alain de Botton’s writing, so I heard about this project when he founded it. The School of Life Press is a small offshoot, and I was mildly intrigued to see what it offered.

I therefore plucked this from the shelf and dived in, reading it from cover to cover in a single sitting (it’s quite short).

It discusses confidence as a learned skill, which is always a helpful reminder. The cover image of a ship being tossed by the waves exemplifies this: the new seafarer will be terrified, whereas the old hand has learned to trust the ship and so is confident in even the roughest waters.

That observation probably isn’t new to you, and that’s typical of this book. It’s a concise summary of well-worn wisdom, but it doesn’t have much new to say. There was one observation that was new to me: that those who see the good in others are likely to be less confident themselves, as they tend to place a higher value on the opinions of others (rather than seeing everyone else as idiotic and therefore relying on one’s own view and drive).

I’d have enjoyed a meatier and more challenging book on the topic, with a little more personality to it… but then again, a book like that would probably be too long and divisive to be left in a hotel room.

It was certainly more welcome than a bedside Bible.

This is an Edificity video covering a minor change to the way that station names are painted in a small number of stations on the Tyne and Wear Metro. It’s a change I hadn’t noticed.

Something ineffable about the video warmed my heart. In a time when it often feels like everything in the country has become a bit slap-dash, it’s lovely to see that there are still people around who care about aesthetic detail. It’s so unusual these days to see a response to something like this that isn’t angry or snarky, but just quietly and persuasively argues that there may have been a better approach.

We could perhaps all learn a thing or two.

This 2011 debut novel was much-acclaimed—but passed me by completely. When I came across some of the extensive praise for it recently, I thought I’d take it out of the library to see what all the fuss was about.

It’s a slim novel in 19 chapters, each of which presents an individual vignette. It is narrated by the youngest of three brothers who were born to teenage parents in 1980s rural New York. The chronologically presented chapters take us through their childhood, exploring their close knit family unit until it loosens as the boys come of age.

I have to confess that I didn’t really enjoy this. There is something about novels narrated by children that I struggle to connect with, even (or perhaps especially) when they are critically acclaimed. I often find their perspective a little unbelievable, and the device of imaging what a child sees in adult relationships tends to come off as a little twee to me. The effect is to reduce the emotional impact of the plot, which seems a shame when it is as loaded as in this book.

I suppose this just wasn’t for me.

In the early days of this blog, the political debate around whether to ban fox hunting was a big deal. Those were, perhaps, simpler times.

I think some would be surprised to read these days that I argued against banning hunting with foxes. It may seem even more surprising that I probably still would—yet I would argue perhaps more forcefully against repealing the ban now that it exists.

My arguments against the ban were essentially liberal: we shouldn’t go around banning stuff, cruelty to animals was already illegal, and we should use the laws that we’ve already got. But there was also a significant dose of priority-setting: it seemed to me that banning an activity as perversely niche as fox hunting could not possibly be the best use of Parliamentary time. There is no way that it could possibly be viewed as ranking among, say, the top hundred problems facing the country.

My arguments against repealing it would be basically the same: we shouldn’t signal through a change of the law that cruelty to animals is okay and it absolutely shouldn’t be anywhere near our list of top priorities.

I think you can read a lot into this. I’m all for a permissive society that tolerates difference. I’d rather see something that I personally disagree with continue than restrict freedoms for us all. And, at least to me, reversing a ban is qualitatively different from being permissive in the first place—even if it’s philosophically equivalent.

I was reflecting on this today when I was trying to figure out why Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to remove tampons and sanitary towels from the men’s toilets at Meta seemed so offensive. After all, I’m not offended when these facilities aren’t offered, as in the vast majority of workplace and public toilets—though I am impressed when a business does offer them, demonstrating that they are thoughtful and inclusive. The same goes, by the way, for sanitary bins in men’s toilets—a rare sight, but one needed by far more than just the trans and non-binary population.

But if I’m not offended when these facilities aren’t offered, then why am I when they are removed?

Well, because while it may return the business to their original position philosophically, the act of making the change is petty, vindictive, persecutory, and fucking cruel. It makes the world a tiny bit worse for all of us—and especially for some of the most marginalised communities in our society. It tells me that the company does not care about the needs of individuals, and would rather see people suffer than stand up for basic values of inclusivity and respect for other human beings.

And that’s not my standard at all.

Middlesbrough’s Royal Exchange building opened in 1868, and quickly became one of the most important sites for industrial deal-making in England at the heart of the town nicknamed ‘Ironopolis’. A very grand Italianate building, it featured all sorts of intricate stonework and decoration.

It was, however, demolished in 1985 to make way for the much uglier A66. As a sop to the historical importance of the site, some of the twiddly bits of stonework are retained on these little poles in Exchange Square, near the original site of the building.