Newcastle has a history of pioneering leadership in the field of paediatrics. In fact, one of the UK’s first paediatric hospitals, the Fleming Memorial Hospital for Sick Children, opened here in the 1860s.

By the late 1890s, we had a second paediatric hospital, the Sanderson Children’s Hospital, where some of the first groundbreaking work in paediatric orthopaedics was carried out.

And, in the last century, Sir James Spence – the UK’s first full-time paediatrician – founded the social paediatrics subspecialty, and revolutionised our understanding of child mortality (and much more besides) through the Newcastle Thousand Families Study.

The Great North Children’s Hospital – of which this is a particularly bad photo – is a £100m development opened in 2010. It is but the next step in this illustrious journey. It’s designed to be as un-hospital like as possible, even including a teenage “penthouse” on the top floor, with a pool table, massive flat screen TV, and some of the best views in the city. It also has unrivalled medical facilities, of course, including a genuinely world-leading “bubble unit” for kids with severe immunity problems.

Who knows what the next step will be?

There have been lots of analyses of the retail cult of A&F written over the years, and this one from Emine Saner in The Guardian is as good as any. If you’re not young enough to be familiar with A&F (that is, if you aren’t in your mid-teens), this is a great primer.

John Simpson Kirkpatrick was a man from South Shields who deserted the merchant navy, and then enlisted with the Australian army at the outbreak of the First World War. He landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915, and found Duffy the donkey within hours of his arrival.

Over the following weeks, John and Duffy ferried wounded soldiers back from the front line and no man’s land while under Turkish fire. It’s said that he sang and whistled while rescuing his comrades, ignoring the rifle fire and flying shrapnel all around him.

Unfortunately, this was to prove his downfall, as he was killed by machine gun fire on his 24th day of ferrying the wounded, aged just 22. His actions saved the lives of over 300 soldiers, and he was recommended for the Victoria Cross, though this wasn’t awarded – a decision that remains contentious in Australia (and South Tyneside) to this day.

Duffy the donkey survived the attack, and continued to ferry wounded soldiers after Kirkpatrick’s death, under the guidance of Richard Henderson. As the soldiers couldn’t bear to leave him behind, Duffy was evacuated to Greece when the army retreated from Gallipoli. He then disappeared, much to the disappointment of the soldiers who wanted to parade him as a war hero in Australia. Reports differ as to whether the Greeks stole Duffy and sold him (donkeys were worth a lot of money), or whether he broke free and ran into the sunset to live out his days in the wild.

This statue of Kirkpatrick and Duffy by local miner-turned-artist Robert Olley stands on Ocean Road in South Shields town centre.

Recently, Regus gave me a free Businessworld Gold membership, which gives me free access to their business lounges. Today, I thought I’d pop into a nearby Regus to check it out. I had some work to do that needed close concentration and I didn’t want the distractions that often come from being in the office, so I had planned to spend the afternoon working from home, and this seemed a reasonable alternative. I was slightly concerned that it would be a bit rubbish, but figured that I could just carry on home if it was.

In fact, I was pleasantly surprised. I installed myself in this ThinkPod, a sort of cocoon containing a desk, chair, reading lamp and power sockets, and worked undisturbed in a quiet environment. There is, of course, free wifi, which seemed pretty fast. There were comfy seats and free hot drink drinks available, but I didn’t use these.

Basically, it was like working in a good library, but more private and more comfortable. It was much nicer than working in a coffee shop, which I’ve done a few times in the past year. I’ll definitely go back over the next year while my free membership lasts, and with over 1,000 locations in 95 countries I can see that this would be invaluable when working away from home .But I’d never dream of paying £25/month for UK access, nor £35/month for global access which appears to be the going rate.

I was really attracted to the idea of this book: 39 passengers on a lifeboat struggling for survival, making tough choices, and operating within a tricky ethical and moral framework.

But the book didn’t live up to its promise. The characters were poorly developed, and I simply didn’t care about them. The single first-person narrative structure lessened the reader’s ability to interpret the situation from multiple points of view. This problem is worsened by the narrator being a dull, submissive, self-centred bore. There are too many flashbacks to the time prior to the sinking of the ship, and too much of the story is set after the final passengers have been rescued. The dilemmas were framed in the predominantly Christian ethical framework of the early 20th century, which was very limiting. And, predictably, there was a church figure amongst the passengers on the lifeboat. Even reading that last sentence alone, you can probably guess his fate.

This is a short book, but it was a struggle to plough through. It had enjoyable moments and passages, but the narrative structure of the story and the period in which it was set both conspired to constrict the moral and ethical superstructure to such an extent that it ceased to be interesting.

In summary, the premise is great, but the execution is poor.

The Lifeboat is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

This is Newcastle’s Sandman Signature hotel, which is Sandman’s first hotel outside of its native Canada.

It occupies the former headquarters of Scottish and Newcastle Breweries, which was by far the UK’s biggest brewer for much of the nineties and noughties. It made everything from Foster’s and Kronenbourg to John Smith’s and Kingfisher – plus, of course, local favourite Newcastle Brown Ale. In 2008, it was taken over by Carlsberg and Heineken, and within a couple of years the company was rebranded as Heineken UK Ltd, closing the book on a company heritage that dates back to 1749.

The hotel is part of the Downing Plaza development that is using striking architecture to create a gateway from the city centre to Newcastle’s nascent Science Central development. This development, on the former site of the Newcastle Brewery itself, will host Newcastle University’s sustainability research institute and other established science-related businesses alongside space dedicated to hosting and aiding science-related start-ups. There will, of course, be the typical retail and leisure sites mixed in there too.

It’s a bold two-decade plan supported by a shopping-list of different organisations, and with ownership of the site shared between the city council and the university. It will be great to see it come to fruition!

As a public health doctor, I was very pleased to see the Stoptober team out in force when I popped to the supermarket today. I wish anyone taking part every strength and every success!

If you smoke but haven’t yet signed up, there’s still time to get involved: sign up at the Stoptober website.

If you don’t smoke: good for you!

A couple of years ago, I was asked by one of the organisations I work with to do an “email audit” – “audit” in the accounting rather than quality sense – looking at how many emails I receive, and what I do with them. That specific project was trying derive what aspects of an email could be tweaked to encourage action, but I found it a useful experience to work out how efficiently I used email.

Every now and again I repeat the process, looking at the emails I receive in a typical week and what I do with them. Sometimes, this spurs action: unsubscribing from newsletters I never read, for example, or resolving to check email less frequently. Since I’ve just done one of these, from 22nd – 28th September, I thought that it might be interesting to share the results on here. I’ve really no idea where I sit in the continuum email recipients in a job like mine, and maybe this will encourage people to share.

So, some figures: over the week in question, which I’ve no reason to suspect was atypical, I received 1,010 emails across all my accounts. I haven’t included anything that my email providers marked as spam. These divided roughly 60% were personal – as in, not related to my main job in Public Health. That’s probably an overestimate, because I wasn’t very good at classifying emails, and tried to err consistently on the side of calling things “personal” rather than “work”.

I divided my actions into three mutually exclusive categories:

1. Deleted without reading – These were emails that I either didn’t open (if using Gmail), or that I deleted at a glance if they happened to be opened in Outlook’s preview pane.
2. Read – These were emails that I read and then deleted or archived. This category covers a multitude of sins, from those emails that I read and realised were nonsense, to those that I read closely as they included important information, but were ultimately not “actionable”.
3. Read and acted – There were emails that I read and acted upon. Again, this covers a wide gamut of stuff, including emails in which I simply clicked on a link, emails I replied to, and emails which kicked off whole streams of work.

This pie chart shows how the proportions stacked up:

These varied slightly by the type of email: I read about 10% more of my work email than my personal email, but acted on 2% more personal mail. All told, I deleted about 62% of my work email and 69% of my personal email without reading it. Which is, I think, an appropriate response to receiving 1,010 emails.

So what does all of this mean? I’ve no idea. I don’t even know whether it means that email is a horrendously inefficient or wonderfully efficient communication method. With email, I can cut through ~65% of the things that don’t interest me in virtually no time; if these were letters or phone calls, I’d have no time to do any work. But, on the other hand, if email were unavailable, how many of these messages would ever bother transforming themselves into other media? Do I just get a load of emails because sending an email is relatively “costless” in terms of money, time, and energy? I certainly don’t feel like I’m drowning in email, and was a little surprised that the totals were so high – about 25% higher than the previous times I’ve done this. Having said that, I have come to rely on Gmail’s “Priority Inbox” feature more than I ever thought I would.

Compared with the first time I did this exercise, the proportion of emails that I’ve deleted without reading has fallen considerably. I don’t remember the exact figures, but they were somewhere near 80%. That shows the effect of the remedial action I’ve taken, I suppose.

Anyway, I’ve no idea if this is of interest to anyone, but I find it a useful exercise, and wonder if you might too? Feel free to comment if you’ve any thoughts to contribute!

This picture of the Queen has been stuck on this black box on Gosforth High Street for months now. I’ve no idea where it came from. Is it a random bit of graffiti? Is it street art? Is it a leftover from some jubilee event? Who knows?

It’s Christmas! Or, at least, John Lewis’s window leads one to believe that it is. It’s only 29th September, for goodness sake!

I know moaning about Christmas getting earlier every year is a little tedious, but really… a Christmas window in a major department store in September?!