A little over twelve months ago, I was asked on a discussion forum to make predictions about the retail sector in 2012. I’d forgotten all about this until today, when somebody pointed out my prescience!

On 30th December 2011, I posted the following (forgive the reformatting!):

M&S is going to have a bad year: They seem to be doing everything humanly possible to disassemble the formula that brought them back from the brink a few years ago. On the other hand, WHSmith’s profits are up, even if their sales are down – I reckon they can ride out the storm for a while. My predictions for chains that will collapse are JJB (frankly surprised they’re still around); Past Times (feels like it’s had its day, so to speak); and Mothercare / ELC (already pulling out of town centres, doesn’t bode well).

And, indeed, M&S had a bad year, WHSmith did reasonably well, Past Times closed, JJB closed, and Mothercare is on the brink.

You might think I’d feel proud of my amazing predictive abilities, but in fact, I feel mainly freaked out – especially since my history with predictions isn’t great. It’s also weird to think that I correctly predicted thousands of job losses – it gives me a creepy sort of guilt, as though I’m somehow responsible.

So given the discomfort I’ve inadvertently caused myself, the only prediction I’ll make for this year is that the economy will fully recover with no more companies folding, and unemployment will hit record low levels. Though if that turns out to be true as well, I might displace Mr Soult as the media’s favourite north east retail analyst!

Nick Robinson’s Live from Downing Street is a thoroughly enjoyable romp through the history of the relationship between politicians and the media, from the very beginnings of Parliament to the present day. It’s part historical and part autobiographical, with the latter part in particular including lots of amusing anecdotes about Robinson’s time as a political journalist. Some of these genuinely made me laugh out loud. It also has a lengthy “last word”, in which Robinson muses on the future of political journalism, and the opportunities and threats offered by introducing to the UK biased broadcasting in the mould of Fox News.

He has an easy writing style making this an easy relaxed read. He sometimes has a slightly peculiar reliance on turns of phrase which fail to accurately communicate what he means to say: for example, there’s a passage where he introduces Gordon Brown’s disastrous flirtations with YouTube by saying that politicians have always been keen to embrace technology to communicate their message – something which he’s spent most of the first two-thirds of the book disproving.

He gives a very eloquent account of the effect of the plurality of media in the broadest sense meaning that people surround themselves with messages that support their world viewpoint, and the effect this in turn has on perceptions of bias at the BBC. This is something I’ve been banging on about on Twitter for ages, in a far less coherent manner, and it was interesting to see that the same thoughts have occurred to that organisation’s Political Editor. He also gives an interesting discussion of the nature of bias and impartiality, which I very much enjoyed.

There isn’t an awful lot of new stuff in this book. I think many people who follow politics in detail are probably aware of the history of the BBC and the historic developments in the relationship between journalists and the press. But Robinson presents all of this with such a clear narrative and in such a clear way that I still found myself very engaged with the content even when he was describing events I knew well.

The lengthy discussion of recent events and media figures – phone hacking being perhaps the most notable example – will probably make this book date quite quickly. Indeed, the mentions of Leveson “whose report has not been published at the time of writing” already make it feel a little behind the times, particularly since Leveson’s report covers much of the same ground discussed by Robinson.

Either way, this is well worth a read, and comes highly recommended.

Live from Downing Street is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle.

Lectures can, in short, bring a subject alive and make it more meaningful. Alternatively, they can kill it.

A true, but not altogether encouraging, sentiment in this excellent 2001 paper by Brown and Manogue, sent to me by Newcastle Medical School to help me prepare my first big scary lecture for their students.

The snow has arrived in greater measure overnight… and now I feel like I don’t want to leave the house! In fairness, it’s not actually all that deep this morning – note the clear tyre tracks in the photo. Anyway, work awaits, so I guess I’ll have to venture out!

As I head to bed, we’ve got just the lightest of dustings of snow here in Newcastle. But with an amber weather alert in place for a rather heavier dumping over the next 24hrs or so, who knows I’ll be battling through on my way to and from work tomorrow!

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.