I’m celebrating tonight, as this letter arrived today to inform me that I’ve passed my Part B exam, and so earned membership of the Faculty of Public Health.

This is both scary and exciting on a couple of fronts: firstly, I’ve passed all the exams I need to pass to become a consultant in public health; secondly, for the first time since I was nine years old (the current age of my oldest nephew), I’ve no exams planned in the next twelve months. Or at all, for that matter.

It surely won’t be long until I end up like this:

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This is a very interesting concept for a novel. It’s set after the terror attacks that took place in New York eleven years ago yesterday. In a reflection of reality, a group of jurors convenes to select a suitable memorial to the dead from those submitted by designers. In order to ensure that the jury isn’t swayed by the names of some of the internationally renowned designers submitting designs, the designs are judged anonymously. When the winning design is selected, it is found to belong to Mohammed Khan, an ambitious architect who happens to be an American Muslim.

The bulk of the novel describes the consternation, debates, and protests this revelation sets in train. There’s relatively little plot, but lots of first-person reflection on situations.

Unfortunately, it all turns out to be a little dull, primarily because the characters are poorly developed and only consider the situation from within their given view-set. There’s no meta-reflection, if you like, on the wider problem of religion causing dispute. I’m not sure if the author intended to leave that to the reader, but I missed any hint in that direction.

From a plot point-of-view, I’d have liked to have seen the reaction to the final decision explored in more detail outside of the central characters, as that’s really the most interesting concept.

So, in the end, it’s an interesting set-up, but ends up being a little empty, and hence more than a little disappointing.

I struggled with the star-rating on this one: it sits somewhere between two and three stars. I ultimately plumped for three on the strength of the premise more than anything else… I’m still not completely convinced it lives up to that rating.

The Submission is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

I’m now officially a flu-fighting super-doc, and hope that all of my clinical colleagues are similarly brilliant!

The evidence is clear: in randomised trials, care facilities with high uptake of flu vaccine amongst staff have been consistently shown to have significantly lower levels of flu-like illness and mortality. In the 2010/11 flu season, the UK saw 2,200 ITU admissions with flu, mostly in under-65s.

So do your bit, and get your jab!

This is the label from Wendy’s new jeans. If I bought clothes that had been extensively destroyed before I bought them, I’d be looking for a refund. Apparently, though, it makes these particular jeans more desirable!

I know I forgot to post a picture yesterday – it’s the Sunday curse striking again. I’ll post an extra photo to make up the numbers either later today or tomorrow.

I must have walked past this plaque on Osbourne Road in Jesmond tens or hundreds of times, yet never noticed it! Muriel Robb won the 1902 Wimbledon ladies’ single final in a match which was the longest on record at the time, beating Charlotte Sterry.

I came across the former entrance to the Granada Studios Tour today, which has (in an act that looks a lot like corporate vandalism) been painted a single block of colour and had ITV’s uninspired corporate logo slapped on the front.

It’s a sad sight. I visited the Granada Studios Tour a few times in my childhood – I have particularly strong memories of visiting with school when the whole complex was rented out for the whole school in celebration of the principal’s significant birthday.

The Tour closed abruptly in 1999, one of the casualties of ITV’s financial rationalisation after the collapse of ITV Digital. There’s talk of the Museum of Science and Industry taking over the complex when Granada vacates it next year, though there remains a real threat of the land being sold and this keystone site in our national cultural heritage being flattened – especially after English Heritage’s baffling decision not to grant the site Listed status.

So, in case it’s in a skip this time next year, here’s another picture of the complex’s iconic Granada TV logo:

This is a great story from the LA Times by Ken Besinger. It’s about how American Airlines sold tickets for unlimited first-class travel which ended up costing the company a huge amount of money. It has schadenfreude by the bucketload.

It’s only today that I’ve realised that this is no longer called the GMEX, despite it being quite some time since it was renamed.

It was, of course, formerly Manchester Central station, until the disastrous Beeching axe left this as one of 2,000-or-so stations without a railway line. From 1969 to 1986, the building stood empty, but it was then developed into the GMEX, or Greater Manchester Exhibition Centre. Its facilities have been extended, refurbished, and revitalised several times since, and in 2007 it was renamed Manchester Central in homage to its history. It retains Britain’s second-widest unsupported iron arch after the one at St Pancras.

In the background is Britain’s tallest building outside of London, the 47-storey Beetham Tower. This dull name comes was given by the developer, which has also given its name to towers in Birmingham, Brighton, Liverpool and London, showing a quite considerable lack of imagination.

Putting “award winning restaurants” on a road sign seems like a great low-cost way for a local authority to provide free advertising, promoting local businesses and boosting the local economy. I wonder if it works in practice? And if so, I wonder if the benefits are great enough to outweigh the (probably small?) risk of diverting drivers’ attention from the road for a little longer, and making the sign (marginally) more difficult to interpret?

Back in 2005, When the Guardian relaunched in its Berliner format, a number of new sections were added to the Saturday edition. One of these was the slightly ill-conceived (but still-running) Family section, and therein lay the anonymous Living with Teenagers column, a weekly diatribe on the difficulty and horrors of family life in bourgeois England. Specifically, predictably, amongst the London middle-classes.

This book – a collection of these columns – is possibly the least self-aware volume I’ve ever read. The writing is even less self-aware than mine, and I take some beating in those stakes. And yet, that’s not a criticism; In fact, it’s what makes the whole thing work.

This is the story of a thoroughly modern parent try, and hopelessly failing, to deal with her three teenagers’ behavioural abberations of varying scale. She suspects her kids are on drugs, she’s shocked when they’re unhappy at the prospect of spending two weeks in an isolated cottage, and terrified by bad academic grades. In essence, she views everything her children do with her own frame of reference, which is not only far removed from theirs, but sometimes appears to reside in an utterly different universe to the rest of us.

Not only that, she views everything they get up to as a direct result of something she’s done at some point in their upbringing: a life-course view that descends into kind of social post hoc ergo propter hoc, with no more validity here than in a court of law.

Yet the anonymous mother seems genuinely to struggle throughout to be fair and accurate in her reportage, despite being so wildly removed from that goal. And whilst lacking self-awareness in her writing, she is incredibly self-critical, and perceives that she has many flaws as a parent.

Living  with Teenagers warms the heart, in that the imperfect children and the imperfect parents rub along, and genuinely care for and love one another. Yet it’s also wonderfully, unintentionally, darkly comic, and more engaging than I ever expected.

Unfortunately, the wonderful denouement to the series was published in The Guardian long after the book was released: The friends of one of the teenagers found out about the column, and it came to an abrupt end – with Jack given the right of reply.

If you prefer, you can read all of the columns online, but nothing’s quite the same as settling down with something akin to a diary, and becoming fully imersed in the world of the anonymous author and her family – you’ll want to intervene in the slow-motion car crashes within, you’ll be frustrated at the mother’s inability to keep firm on even a single issue, and you’ll laugh out loud again and again, but I’m certain that you’ll feel a renewed sense of the good of humanity.

Living with Teenagers is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback. There’s no Kindle edition available, which is pretty unforgivable these days. Boo!