I thought I’d bake today. I’m not sure what possessed me, but these cookies actually turned out alright!

A few years ago, I did a stint in General Practice. One of the commoner things people would come and see me for was a sore throat, and as a good antimicrobial steward I tended to send them away with self-care advice.

One bit of advice I routinely gave to adult patients was to gargle with salt water: dissolve half a teaspoon of salt in half a cup of boiled water mixed with half a cup of cold water, gargle with it for a minute and spit it out. I think it may even have been written on the little self-care leaflets I used to dish out.

This has a surprising amount of evidence behind it for a home remedy, though largely in the context of postoperative throat pain. It is now the published NHS advice for sore throats—it may have been at the time too, I’ve no idea.

What sticks in my mind about this advice is the number of people who mentioned at unrelated later appointments what excellent advice it had been. I even remember a singer telling me the advice had rescued a performance she thought she may have to cancel. In my experience, patients aren’t especially forthcoming with positive feedback on self-care strategies, but I really seemed to get a lot about this advice. Despite that, and despite a vague awareness of the evidence base, I didn’t really believe it. I mean, it sounds like utter nonsense, like the sort of folk remedies you hear for all kinds of things that aren’t evidence-based (and can even be downright unhelpful).

And yet… over the last week or so, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I’ve been suffering from a really sore throat. I tried gargling salt water. And, blow me down with a feather, it really works. Certainly, I’ve found it far more effective than any throat sweets or sprays I’ve come across.

I think there’s probably a deep message in here somewhere about common sense being remarkably uncommon, or about doctors being the worst patients, or about a disconnect between academic evidence and belief systems. But really, I’m just trying to say if you have a sore throat, try gargling with saltwater. It worked for me.

I came across the advert at the top of the post via the Boston Public Library online. I wonder if there are any medications advertised today as for both “man and beast”? If you’re wondering, you didn’t have to get your “beast” to gargle it:
it could also be applied topically (hence ‘liniment’, which is a word we don’t use nearly enough these days).

For the last couple of days, the news has been dominated by the story of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, who fell ill in Salisbury a few days ago. The police are investigating this as attempted murder via a nerve agent, and there is much suspicion that the Russian state may be behind the crime. (One of the stranger things about delaying posts for a year is that you’ll know how this all turned out—I don’t!)

Many people are drawing comparisons between this case and the Alexander Litvinenko affair of 2006. There are two really great bits of writing on that affair which are well worth reading, and this seems as good an opportunity as any to recommend them again.

The first is a fantastic long-form article called Bad Blood by one of my favourite journalists, Will Storr. This is particularly good for setting Litvinenko’s murder in the historical context of murders of Russian dissidents, and—like everything Will writes—has fantastic prose. Re-reading this again today, I note that Will talks briefly about using nerve agents absorbed through the skin as a murder weapon, which would fit neatly with the public statements about the Skripal case so far. Will originally wrote this for Matter, a start-up by another favourite journalist of mine, Bobbie Johnson, concentrating on publishing long-form journalism. Matter has since ‘pivoted’ into Matter Studios, “a multi-platform content studio and incubator”, whatever that is.

The second is Guardian journalist Luke Harding’s extraordinary book, A Very Expensive Poison. This is one of the most arresting non-fiction books I’ve ever read. Harding gives a clear, detailed and compelling account, including all of the cack-handed bungling which humanises the Litvinenko affair and makes it that much more horrific. Harding also dives deeply into the investigation of the murder and the judgement of the subsequent public enquiry. It’s an absolute must-read.

On the other hand, absolutely not worth reading is this, by a pre-clinical medical student who thought he knew something about radiation, but clearly didn’t.

The rather lovely photo of magnolia blossom at the top (which was taken in Salisbury) is by rachelgreenbelt, edited and used under Creative Commons Licence.

Just recently, a few of my “internet friends” – people I’ve been digitally stalking for a decade or more – have fired up their old blogs again and started writing on a daily basis. This is also a bit Zeitgeisty at the moment: there have been lots of magazine articles and books which have mentioned the benefits of taking time to publicly air one’s feelings on a regular basis through the medium of online writing. I was finally pushed over the edge to write this post after Duncan Stephen published this post on his blog.

Years ago, I went through a phase of blogging daily: I usually commented on political events, with an inflated sense of my own importance and understanding. In fact, I blogged no less than 640 times in 2005. I don’t think much of it was high-quality stuff.

I’ve recently installed a nifty WordPress plugin which emails me daily with my own historical posts published on the same calendar date. Despite the fact that much of the content is utter bilge, I really enjoy reading these; they always bring back contemporaneous memories and make me reflect on how my life and views have changed.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I see the benefit of regular blogging. Over the past couple of years, I’ve toyed with blogging daily, thinking about how I could emulate better bloggers by exploring whatever topic happens to be on my mind. I’ve even gone as far as to have a “dry run” of daily blogging on two separate occasions in the last couple of years, experimenting for a few days with unpublished posts just to see whether I could stick with it. I never could.

I was often inspired by things that had happened in my life (meetings, discussions, events) and this left me concerned that someone would read the post and take it the wrong way. I worried that in the contemporaneous context, people would see themselves in everything I wrote, and probably take offence. I was also wary about sharing travel plans, lest my house be burgled or car stolen!

I have occasionally tried writing a private diary or journal along similar lines, but I never stick with that because it seems self-indulgent and unproductive. I think there is something beneficial about writing content that is going be published (even if no-one reads it): there’s an element of self-editing which helps with critical thinking.

So here is my plan for a mad experiment: I’m going to blog more frequently—possibly even daily. However, I’m going to publish what I write with a delay of a year.

I’m sitting writing this in Wendy’s Ikea Strandmon winged chair on 6 March 2018: if all goes to plan, you will be reading this on 6 March 2019. Unless the whole thing fizzles out after a couple of days, in which case I’ll delete the lot and this writing will never see the light of day.

The photo at the top is by wuestenigel, edited and used under Creative Commons Licence.

My favourite book this month was André Aciman’s Enigma Variations. In five parts, this novel related the five great “loves” in the life of Paul, who grew up in a small Italian town and later moved to New York. Having also recently read Call Me By Your Name, I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that no contemporary writer can do lustful longing quite like Aciman – and there was a lot of that in this book. The first section, which concerned Paul’s boyhood infatuation with a carpenter, was the most affecting and memorable for me. Paul’s fluid (and unlabeled) sexuality across his life-course and the complexity of his social relationships felt at once very “modern” and very true to life in my generation. But the real power in this book was in the emotional weight – and particularly the weight of that desperate, aching, lustful longing that Aciman writes so well.

I saw the movie of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal some 13 years or so ago, and finally got round to reading the book this month. Unreliably narrated by a bitter history teacher, it told the story of a young pottery teacher’s affair with an underage school child. It was a complex and layered novel which I think had loneliness as its central theme. I found it thought provoking, and also enjoyed the dark humour laced throughout. I found most of the character simultaneously thoroughly unlikable and utterly endearing.

Rarely in my life am I prompted to consider the nature of art, so Grayson Perry’s Playing to the Gallery was a little off the beaten track for me. It was an examination of what constitutes art and how artists (and to some extent, art markets) function in the modern world. It was written in Perry’s usual wryly irreverent style, which is very funny at times – and is full of his cartoonist sketches to illustrate particular points. I found it though-provoking, and it seemed to pack in more content and ideas than its 134 pages would suggest, without ever feeling crammed in.

The Iceberg was Marion Coutt’s memoir of how her husband’s diagnosis with a brain tumour, and his subsequent death, affected her family’s life. It had a deeply moving poetic style, yet also a straightforward linear narrative which dealt with the practicalities of daily life in an extraordinary period. It was an honest, unflinchingly intimate portrait of love and grief. Reading it made me feel very sad. It made me reflect on how I would feel and cope in similar circumstances, and at times it was hard to continue reading, which reflects the power of the account.

Fredrick Backman’s A Man Called Ove was a heartwarming, cosy, comic fireside read about a grumpy Swedish widower, which follows exactly the plot you’d expect from a comic tale with that starting point. It relied quite heavily on stereotype, as books like this usually do, and all of the characters were hence pretty two-dimensional. I enjoyed this while it lasted, but I wouldn’t run out to read any more of it. Henning Koch’s translation made for an easy read.

The decision to publish one of Ivan Rogers’s speeches as a 90-page book raised eyebrows this month. Nonetheless, I found the Nine Lessons in Brexit offered by the Britain’s former EU Permanent Representative to be commendably clear explanations of why much of what is said by people on both sides of the Brexit debate is nonsensical. Rogers didn’t pull punches: this contained a blistering attack on the Government’s approach to Brexit negotiations, which have resulted in “an obviously bad deal”. But there is plenty of light offered alongside the heat. I think Rogers argument that we need more honesty with the public is true not just about Brexit but about a whole range of policy issues.

The two key messages of Ryan Holiday’s Perennial Seller, in which he tried to derive the formula behind projects with a lasting cultural impact, were that lasting successes take really hard work and need to be targeted at a specific audience. Because I’m not really a “creator”, in as much as I’m not really someone who tries to sell stuff, much of the content of this book was completely irrelevant to me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading a book which extolled the virtue of hard graft rather than quick tricks to success.

I found Gerald Maslbary’s translation of Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture to be dense, way over my head, and consequently really quite boring. It is apparently a very important work in its field, but it was just too much for this reader.