A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twenty-second post of a series.

Occasionally, I take a bus home from work. This is usually if I’m too tired or too late to walk, or if the skies have opened. The bus runs every 15 mins and I can track it from my phone. Recently, it has been re-routed, and stops just metres from my work desk and metres from my front door. If I’m working late, I’m frequently the only person on the bus.

Basically, I have a chauffeur now.

I’m currently reading Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers. She quotes Queen Mary: “You are a member of the British royal family. We are never tired and we all love hospitals.”

I’ve often reflected on the challenge in medicine of the disparity in the sense of occasion between the doctor and the patient. For the doctor, a consultation is one of a long series to get through; for the patient, it may be a significant life event. Meeting that moment is, I think, a key and underestimated skill of being a good doctor.

How much more is that true for the royal family, who must always be bright-eyed and sparkling, even if this is the twentieth worthy community project they’ve visited in a given week.

In a online meeting at work this week, a colleague who I don’t know very well introduced themselves partly through reference to their Twitter account (“Some of you may also know me from Twitter, where I frequently tweet about a topic irrelevant to this meeting…”)

I was caught off-guard by how many immediate, strong, conflicting reactions this provoked in me. It’s been playing on my mind far more than it deserves to, and I still can’t figure out what I thought about it: it was somehow intensely irritating, totally unremarkable, oddly refreshing, and many other things, all at the same time.

Given that I can only remember to use the current name of my employer about 50% of the time, I’m hardly a shining example of how these things ought to be done.

Another Tina Brown quote, this time referring to the Duchess of Cornwall: “There was honesty in her countryside complexion and crinkly, smiling eyes. Her hair never presenting any unsettling surprises.”

I’m honestly not sure whether that’s a complement or an insult. I wonder if my hair has ever ‘presented unsettling surprises’?

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twenty-first post of a series.

I’m still of the opinion that Twitter is on the wane in terms of its cultural influence, even if not in terms of other measures. I wondered a few weeks ago “whether by this time next year we’ll still see the same constant exhortations by television and radio programmes to follow their people on Twitter.”

The Political Editor of the BBC said this week, “my focus is on television, radio & the BBC News website and app. I’m less fussed about Twitter, to be honest.”

Confirmation bias is a cruel trickster, but it really does look like this fits into the trend that I think I’m seeing.

The man is obviously unfit to lead. His ability to cling onto office after so many resignation-requiring failures is something quite atrocious. But no-one besides him thinks he can win another election, which seems to me to make a “bet the house” early surprise poll a better prospect than being binned by his own side for an electable alternative.

Monkeypox, monkeypox monkeypox monkeypox, monkeypox monkeypox. Monkeypox.

Clowns do not develop. Purposelessness pervades. The emphasis is on anti-meaning. There is a deliberate fracturing of cause and effect.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twentieth post of a series.

I’ve been reading Simon Kuper’s Chums this week. He writes, “Britain does have world-class scientists, engineers and quants, but they are stuck in the engine room while the rhetoricians drive the train.”

That feels familiar.

There is a remarkable, powerful article in the latest Prospect (originally published in Die Zeit) bringing together a victim of torture at Guantánamo Bay and his torturer. There are so many layers to it that I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read it.

I mentioned in February that I had a preference for paper notebooks as I’d found nothing quite as “glanceable.” One suggestion in response was to try OneNote with a window either docked or “pinned” on top of all other windows, and actually that seems to work pretty well. I haven’t used my paper notebook for a month or so.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The nineteenth post of a series.

I’ve been irritated over the past couple of years by the emergence of the phrase “at pace” to mean “quickly” (e.g. “we are working at pace”). It’s clearly nonsensical as the pace isn’t specified. I was irritated afresh this week by seeing it appear in a reputable newspaper for the first time.

It’s clearly a new coinage, having not yet been picked up by any of the major dictionaries. I’ve convinced myself that it must be a mishearing of the word “apace” which is a perfectly fine synonym for “quickly”. I’m making it my mission to use “apace” in documents more often, before it’s outpaced by “at pace”.

If I’d been doing weeknotes a few years ago, you’d have been subject to a similar rant about the different between “auspices” and “aegis”, but I’ll spare you. Just know that if you write “under the auspices of…” then you almost always mean “under the aegis of…”. Or, even better, reword whatever you’re trying to say with altogether less ridiculous phrasing.

And don’t get me started on “while” versus “whilst”. My strong preference is to only ever use the latter if you also plan to use “whence” in whatever you’re writing.

I’ve been reading James Bridle’s excellent New Dark Age this week. Chapter nine, which is about YouTube, opened my eyes. I’m also listening to the New York Times podcast Rabbit Hole at the moment, which is mostly about YouTube, and the two make a startling combination.

I’m not a particularly regular user of YouTube, but thought I had a reasonable idea of what it was all about. It turns out, I didn’t have a clue. It’s deeper, darker and altogether less savoury that I ever imagined.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The eighteenth post of a series.

Wendy and I had a fantastic meal at Newcastle favourite 21 this week. We were trying to work out how long it had been since we’d last eaten there: we quickly realised it was before the 2015 name change, and eventually worked out that it must have been 2013. Hopefully, we’ll be back sooner!

I’m probably the last to say it, but Charlotte Ivers’s column in The Sunday Times last week gives a brilliantly clear account of the constant background nature of culture of Westminster sexual harassment. By-the-by, Charlotte also writes a Substack I really enjoy, in which she gives podcast recommendations.

According to this website, this bank opened in 1894 as part of the North East Banking Company and became part of the Bank of Liverpool twenty years later. In 1918, it first became part of Martins Bank, and this ghost sign was covered by that of Barclays in 1969. The branch closed a couple of months ago, just shy of its 128th birthday.

The branches of Santander, NatWest and Nationwide on the same stretch of road are also post-pandemic victims of branch closures, though Lloyds, HSBC, Halifax, Virgin Money and the Newcastle Building Society remain.

I’ve been racking my brain to recall when I last ventured into a bank. I withdrew £20 of pound coins for parking meters in rural areas about a year ago, but I did that at the Post Office and I think it may have been the last time I used either cash or a physical bank card, let alone a branch.

I thought I had a fairly good grasp of the general issues affecting online news and digital advertising, but Donald MacKenzie’s article in The LRB made me realise the superficiality of my understanding. I had no idea, for example, that “a plausible rough estimate is that UK news publishers lost £50 million in the early months of the pandemic because of ad-blocking of their stories about it.”

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The seventeenth post of a series.

My second round of COVID has kept me quieter than usual this week. Wendy has suffered too this time round, which has led to me moving out of our study temporarily so that we didn’t have to spend the week in the same room on competing calls. I have therefore spent much of the week in what I refer to as our ‘reading room’, and what Wendy calls ‘the man cave’.

We’ve both been enjoying Ted Lasso this week, even if we are quite late to the party. It’s a bit silly and sentimental, and therefore perfect right now. I would never have imagined I’d enjoy a programme which is (sort of nominally) based around football.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The sixteenth post of a series.

It’s not a new observation, but Rob Francis’s recent blog post crystallised some thoughts on the incompatibility of the two great nostalgic laments. It can’t be that life was both globally harder “in the old days,” requiring generations to be more resilient, and yet also globally easier, making a return to those times a noble goal.

I went into a small shop this week and asked for paracetamol. The assistant said they didn’t sell medicines, but offered me a couple out of her own handbag. If she hadn’t been so self-effacing about it, I may have been slightly scared; though in the event, I was just bowled over (though still politely declined).

I’ve been in a time-travelling lift this week.

Wendy and I have been thinking about sang- words this week, and their bloody connections (sanguine, sangfroid, consanguinity, sangria, exsanguinate…)

Various pages from the 1876 Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer (though then with an older title) have appeared in my “photo memories” this week. I took them when working on the 2012 report.

The report starts with one of the most florid tributes to a predecessor I have ever read. This is Dr Edward Cator Seaton’s first report, having just taken over from the first Chief Medical Officer, Sir John Simon, who held the post for twenty-one years. It concludes:

I am deeply sensible of the disadvantage at which I stand in being called upon to follow Mr. Simon in the continuance of this great work; and the chief hope I have of being able to do this, with even the most moderate degree of success, is derived from the close and intimate association with him I have enjoyed for nearly 20 years in every matter having relation to the Public Health.

It also has brilliant photos of the Crown Glue Works:

Cator Seaton sadly didn’t last long in the role. He died in 1880.

Firearm-related injuries are now the leading cause of death for those aged 1-19 in the USA. I’m never sure where limits on personal freedom should lie in life, but surely this balance can’t be right.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The fifteenth post of a series.

The blossom on this tree makes me smile on my walk to work each morning.

A Prime Minister led his government to impose the most severe restrictions on basic social freedoms in living memory. He, members of his staff and members of his Cabinet chose not to follow those rules themselves, even while in the workplace where those rules were created. The Prime Minister lied about that behaviour repeatedly.

The police have found that the Prime Minister broke the law on one occasion, and it seems likely that their investigations into other events will reach the same conclusion.

Yet, the Prime Minister has not resigned, there’s no serious attempt to remove him from office. His Party think he’s the best person to lead the country through the rest of the pandemic and the Party into elections next month.

What have we become?

The HSJ’s satirical email this week ended with a suggestion that national leaders think NHS workers shouldn’t be allowed to “just get one with their jobs” because “nobody goes to work just to save lives”—and oof, that felt close to the bone in terms of how things seem to be run right now.

Most people who risk their lives with nothing but the shirts on their backs to cross the Channel are granted asylum in the UK, having escaped horrors I can scarcely imagine. Some don’t make it that far: they drown. Rather than responding with open arms, boundless compassion and warm hugs, our country proposes to fly many of these people to Rwanda, with no prospect of return.

What have we become?

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The fourteenth post of a series.

Perhaps I’m naive, but it feels to me like ‘anti-Twitter’ sentiment is gaining momentum. In the last couple of days alone, my inbox has received Paul Bradley Carr’s article about the benefits of quitting Twitter and Megan McArdle’s year-old Washington Post article arguing for “major institutions in the media and think-tank world to tell their employees to get the hell off Twitter.”

There’s probably a degree of confirmation bias in my thinking here, given that Brexit led to my own Twexit. Yet, it does all lead me to wonder if the tide is turning, and whether by this time next year we’ll still see the same constant exhortations by television and radio programmes to follow their people on Twitter and to Tweet out our opinions. Maybe enthusiasm really is waning.

We know that the Chancellor was among those who attended a birthday gathering for the Prime Minister at a time when social gatherings were illegal. We know that he has received a police questionnaire about his activities. We are led to believe, therefore, that there is a probability that a fixed penalty notice will follow.

It’s also plain that, assuming the Chancellor has leadership ambitions, resigning in the wake of a fixed penalty notice is his only viable option. Standards in public life are sure to form a key plank of any future leadership contest, and the millstone of a lockdown-breaking conviction can only be lightened by a fulsome mea culpa.

One possible defence, which would be popular with some, is “I didn’t realise the rules were so stringent. I would never have supported them if I had. I was distracted by working on the much-praised furlough scheme. I will now resign for failing to follow the rules and for failing to hold others in Government to account in their pandemic response.”

It is plain that the resignation of a fined Chancellor makes it more difficult for a fined Prime Minister to avoid being removed from office. It’s therefore hard not to see this week’s wall-to-wall negative coverage of the Chancellor as helpful to the Prime Minister if it serves to snuff out any leadership ambition.

I’ve been reading Ali Smith’s Companion Piece this week—review to follow at the end of the month—and wow Smith’s quick-turnaround novels feel almost like therapy. Every book in the Seasonal Quartet hit the bullseye, and this latest volume is no different. The crystal clarity Smith can bring to the chaos of modern times, and the connections she elucidates between ideas, are like nothing I see anywhere else. She is just brilliant.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The thirteenth post of a series.

Three years on, I still think this is a tabloid exposé or social media outrage just waiting to happen.

I caught a glimpse this week of Sky News’s 2019 election branding—“The Brexit Election”—and wondered whether, given all that has happened since, anyone there regrets giving their coverage a title with such a narrow focus. Though, it’s not like Sky were alone in concentrating on that single issue.

Given the major tests of the resulting Government in terms of competence on health and foreign affairs, I wonder if journalists generally feel like the election campaign coverage rigorously tested the parties on those issues.

Having to trudge to work through ice and snow on the day before the cold weather alert service closes for the year feels like cutting it fine.