This is Molly: unveiled on the banks of the Wear earlier this year, the statue commemorates the women who kept Sunderland’s shipyards running during the World Wars. She was sculpted by Ron Lawson.

Shipbuilding was a continuous occupation on Wearside for about seven centuries, until the last shipyard closed in 1988. It perhaps lends an extra air of poignancy to the statue to realise that it’s commemorating an important contribution to an industry that no longer exists, and shows a woman at work in an occupation that’s now lost to Wearside history.

The same artist is responsible for this nearby sculpture showing two shipbuilders eating their lunch towards amid a dying industry, perhaps contemplating their employment fate:

In my day job, I am the successor to the District Medical Officer referred to in this notice pinned to a wall in an early 1900s school at Beamish.

The list has expanded, though everything on the Beamish list is more or less still on the list today, though not always in quite the same way.

Consumption is, of course, better known now as TB, as notifiable now as it ever was.

Croup can be caused by many things, and isn’t notifiable in itself, but can be a symptom of diphtheria, which is certainly notifiable.

The dodgiest one is erysipelas, a skin infection. This can be caused by a Group A Streptococcus infection, and can be invasive, in which case it would be notifiable.

The first order for the national collation of notifiable disease data in England and Wales was made by the Local Government Board in 1910. The first statistics followed in 1911, though were pretty incomplete, so most data sets only report from 1912 onwards.

A list of notifiable diseases from the early 1900s might therefore seem a bit anachronistic for Beamish’s school—but local systems of notification like this vastly pre-date efforts to collate data on a national footprint. Notification of certain diseases to local medical officers became legally mandated in 1889, and existed in other forms for many years before that.

In the world of twenty-first century public health, my predecessors would be shocked to learn that it’s sometimes forgotten that notification enables (first and foremost) timely action in response to individual cases to protect the population. Compilation of those reports into statistics is an important secondary use—but not the primary aim.

I recently walked past Leith Library which is almost a century old. I did not expect to later discover that, in 1976, an elephant popped in:

This photo is courtesy of The Scotsman, 15 January 1976, where it is reported that:

Indras, a five-year old female elephant now appearing in a circus at Leith Theatre, is helping Edinburgh Library Service in their campaign to remind people to return their books on time. She carried a load of books yesterday to Leith Library, where Mr Peter Allan (70), of Portland Street, Leith (left), questions whether the table will stand her weight.

The past truly is a different universe.

I’ve walked past this premise in Bangor many times over the past twenty years or so, and always wondered about it. The combination of ‘self-service marketing’—which seems an odd thing in itself—and ‘hosiery factors’—whatever they are—fries my brain.

Some dedicated sleuthing hasn’t revealed an awful lot, though in an advert in the Mid-Ulster Mail from 1 March 1990, they declare themselves to be:

But this just provides more bafflement: surely the suppliers of the finest hosiery in all the land would be able to spell the name of the thing they sell?

In medical school, Wendy and I were lectured by a paediatrician with a unique approach to slide design: he would very often use an inappropriately large font size, causing words to break across lines. Seeing the way ‘Hartlepool’ was written on the back of this boat gave me a little chuckle, borne of that shared memory.

This is Steetley Pier in Hartlepool. It was never a pleasure pier: it was constructed in the 1960s to pump saline seawater into the local magnesia works. Nevertheless, people—and particularly fishers—used to trespass on it. And so, when the works closed in 2005, the Council knocked down a section to prevent perambulation, leaving only an eye-catching, if slightly forlorn, landmark.

I’m writing this while sitting in an airport lounge, awaiting a flight currently estimated to arrive one hour and twelve minutes late.

Flighty tells me that, over the last sixty days, this flight has arrived early 84% of the time, and within fifteen minutes of schedule 14% of the time. That’s a 98% ‘success’ rate—and yet here I am, still on the ground.

The last time I took this flight—same number, same route—I was also delayed. I’ve taken it seven times in eight years, once even on the same ‘metal’ I’m catching tonight. Three of those trips were more than fifteen minutes late.

This seems… improbable. Wendy and I have a long-standing theory that we have terrible travel luck. My record on this route seems to support that. But is it really a curse—or just confirmation bias?

Looking wider: of my last 150 flights, 66 were delayed by over 15 minutes. That’s 44%. RyanAir tops my personal leaderboard of shame: 75% of their flights have been late for me, with an average delay of an hour and nineteen minutes. British Airways and KLM share second place, both clocking in at a 45% delay rate.

And that really is extraordinary. Across Europe, roughly 80% of flights arrive on time; some airlines manage 90% or more. RyanAir, ironically, is often cited among the punctual. My personal stats are double the industry average.

So, what’s going on?

One theory: I disproportionately fly in the evenings, when aircraft have had all day to accrue delays. That’s certainly true today—my plane started its morning late out of Schiphol, and it’s been playing catch-up ever since.

The obvious solution is to fly earlier. Except… no one wants to be at the airport at 5am unless they’re being hunted. And besides, this particular flight is always at roughly the same time—and yet I’ve managed to take a 98% reliable service and turn it into a coin toss.

Perhaps I am cursed after all.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3, as you may be able to guess from the weirdly misshapen plane in the background.