When I got up this morning, this story about the Guardian’s Araucaria revealing his diagnosis of terminal cancer through one of his cryptic crosswords was all over my Twitter feed. It brought back many happy memories of my grandad, who always enjoyed cryptic crosswords. I used to keep them from the Sunday Times and, occasionally latterly, the Observer, and take them to him. If he managed to complete it within the week, he’d give it back to me to post away and enter the weekly competition, to try and win a pen. We never won!

Sadly, I don’t have my grandad’s intelligence, nor his ability to think through the wordplay of cryptic crosswords, and so haven’t managed to follow in his footsteps in that regard. But when I read the story this morning, I thought that my grandad would have approved of Araucaria’s ingenuity… and I’d certainly have clipped the article and taken it to him!

If something’s going to summarise my day today, it’s probably the fairly addictive game QuizCross! It’s one of the more entertaining social games for mobiles, cleverly combining deceptively simple strategy with fairly tough (by my standards) trivia questions. I’ve been playing it quite a lot over the last few days – and losing a fair amount too!

If you’d like to challenge me, search for ‘sjhoward’.

This weekend, make yourself a coffee have a read of this brilliant article by Julian Baggini from Aeon Magazine, which describes a taste comparison between Nespresso and traditional coffee. But, more than that, it discusses where the real pleasure of coffee drinking lies – and whether risk of imperfection is necessary to achieve perfection. For once, it’s also worth venturing “below the fold” and reading some of the comments, too.

So given that I’ve stopped posting pictures of my face, I’m trying to record something in my scrapbook each day that means something to me – whether that’s something memorable that I’ve done in the day, something that summarises what I’m up to, something meaningful I’ve read, or something that’s brought back memories.

Today, I’m going for the final category. This article about autopsies* (I’d say post-mortems) from the Student BMJ really reminded me of my time studying Forensic Pathology in Calgary. The description of the autopsy process was particularly redolent of my experience, and the quote above certainly made me smile! The aromas were particularly unfamiliar when dealing with “decomps” – corpses that had lain decomposing for some time before being discovered!

It was a great experience, and I’m really glad I chose to take the opportunity to do something completely different to the rest of my medical career when I had the chance.

*You need to complete a free registration to read the whole of this article. Irritating, isn’t it?

Newcastle City Council faces huge funding cuts over the next few years. Nick Forbes, the Council leader, has been talking about this extensively over the past few months. Unfortunately, I think some have lost confidence in his arguments because of his decision to repeatedly push an obviously biased presentation of the statistics.

Hurray, then, for my local MP, Catherine McKinnell, who earlier this week delivered this impassioned speech in the House of Commons. She refused to be drawn into partisan Tory-bashing and mud-slinging. She didn’t suggest that funding cuts were entirely avoidable or unnecessary. Unlike others, she didn’t sink to making dubious accusations about increasing funding in the Tory heartland to win votes.

Instead, Catherine McKinnell gave a factual account of the situation, a passionate description of the effect the funding cuts will have, and set out a reasonable justification for her view that the funding settlement has been unfair. Whether she’s right or wrong, it was a model of brilliant representation of her constituency rather than endless parroting of a standard set of party lines. This week, I’m really proud that she is my MP.

329 days ago, I changed the masthead of this site. Today, I’ve changed it back.

The bold italic Verdana version I’ve reinstated today was always a key part of the site’s identity. Until 329 days ago, I’d used it for almost seven years. Barring a font and colour change, the logo had been the same since for almost nine years. As I’ve been tidying things up in the site design this week, I’ve been taking inspiration from some of the old layouts. Looking at them, it seemed clear to me that ditching that original logo was a mistake: the replacement was weaker, with fewer elements yet somehow less cohesion. So I’ve brought the old one back.

If you’re reading this on the site, you’ll notice that I’ve redesigned the “default” post template to a fairly radical degree. This includes bolder headlines (in the slightly quirky font used in the logo I’ve just ditched), and a plain white background (based on readers’ feedback). I hope too that it looks a little more formal. My thinking was that most of the casual content I post now has its own template, so the content using this template is likely to be my more formal news commentary and the like. This post clearly excepted…! I haven’t applied this design retrospectively, because elements of the contents of those posts were designed to fit the old template.

I’ve reduced the amount of advertising on the site, removing ad spaces that were only bringing in the barest trickle of revenue. There are countless other tweaks to the design across the site, too, and I hope the overall effect is that it looks a little bit tidier. I hope the font tweaks make reading the text a little easier, too. Feel free to leave any suggestions, observations, moans, etc in the comments.

If you’d visited this site four years ago, this is what you’d have seen. There are some elements of that design which I think are better than the ones I have today. And so… watch this space!

Mr Dispenser, Twitter’s highly entertaining anonymous pharmacist, has gone and written a book. He’s compiled just over 130 pages worth of pharmacy-based jokes, anecdotes, and blog posts – and the result is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny.

As a former hospital doctor, I didn’t really know what pharmacists got up to – least of all community pharmacists. The ward pharmacists were friendly folk who stalked the wards correcting my prescriptions in green ink, and putting up with incessant questions posed by curious junior doctors like me. They always seemed to know the answers. I guess my closest brush with community pharmacists came when I worked in general practice, and I’d occasionally get a phone call asking if I really meant to prescribe a drug – to which the answer was almost invariably “No”.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that pharmacists were generally the people, along with nurses, who routinely saved my ass, so I guess I’m pretty well disposed towards them. And from Mr Dispenser’s tweets, I was fairly sure they had a good sense of humour, too.

Pills, Thrills and Methadone Spills removed any doubt. Community pharmacists share a similar geeky and absurdist sense of humour with many GPs and hospital doctors, which means that the humour in this volume aimed directly at my funny bone. I laughed out loud repeatedly when reading this, most often at the pithy anecdotes of insane situations in which pharmacists find themselves – and even when the book is gently (or not so gently!) ribbing doctors. I even get quoted in there at one point!

More than just humour, though, Pills, Thrills and Methadone Spills gave me a better appreciation for what community pharmacists do all day. In that sense, it was even a little bit educational. And a proportion of the profits from the book is being donated to charity.

All of that said, this probably isn’t a book for a general audience. It’s very much aimed at pharmacists. As a non-pharmacist, some bits went over my head to some extent, and I’d imagine that those outside of healthcare would struggle to see the funny side of much of the book. And, if I’m being very picky, I’d probably have liked a bit of a narrative thread in there somewhere too. But Pills, Thrills and Methadone Spills is sure to raise a smile among pharmacists, pharmacy students, and perhaps some more of the medical community besides.

Pills, Thrills and Methadone Spills is available now from amazon.co.uk on Kindle. A paperback is coming later in the year. Mr Dispenser is @MrDispenser on Twitter.

In the interests of full transparency, I declare that I was sent a free electronic review copy of this book. In accordance with this site’s ethical review policy, I have not accepted payment for this review, I have written this review without regard to the source of the product, and I have made a charitable donation equivalent to the retail cost of the e-book.

Today’s the 8th January, one of the commonest days for New Years Resolutions to be forgotten. And, after a week, I’m fairly sick of posting pictures of my own face…

But hey, this is my scrapbook, and I can do what I want with it! And today, I want to post a link to this intriguing brief article by Time’s science editor Jeffrey Kluger about the risks of getting ill in space. It’s really very good!

Here’s me in the office at work. When this was taken, I was writing a lecture for first-year medical students about public health data sources, which isn’t the easiest topic to make engaging! I’m due to deliver it later this month.

I really enjoy teaching as part of my role, and do a fair bit of it. Having said that, this will be the first time I’ve presented to a big scary lecture theatre full of people since I left medical school myself…! Here’s hoping I don’t die of stage fright!