I’ve four books to mention this month.

Beneath the White Coat edited by Clare Gerada

This is a recently published book about doctors’ mental health, edited by the former Chair and current President of the Royal College of GPs and founder of the Practitioner Health Programme. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Clare Gerada a couple of times and found her to be inspirational, and have also met or worked with an almost frightening proportion of the chapter authors at one point or another!

I read this book and was surprised by how much of myself I recognised in the descriptions of doctors’ personalities, and the aspects of their work they find particularly challenging. I found the practical content on “surviving and thriving in medicine” insightful and helpful. The chapter on burnout in doctors, and how most doctors have periods of burnout in their career, was particularly relevant to me right now, after two exceptionally demanding years of pandemic practice.

There is much to think about in here, and much of immediate practical value. It is brilliant.

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

This 2020 first novel by Micah Nemerever was brilliant. Set in 1970s Pittsburgh, the plot follows two precocious college freshmen who are drawn together by their intelligence and slightly offbeat interpretation of the world. But—and this can’t possibly be a spoiler, as it’s the content of the prologue—their obsession (love?) for each other ultimately drives them to committing terrible crimes.

Nemerever does a fantastic job of weaving together the intense emotion of attraction with a sense of growing foreboding. The writing is almost poetic at times, with no wasted words or throwaway lines. The intensity and claustrophobia Nemerever creates is intense enough to feel a little exhausting at times, in the best possible way.

I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel

This short TLS book published about a year ago has been widely praised. It features a combination of lived experience, polemic, and humour used to illustrate that antisemitism has been left out of much of the current present social discourse about racism. I thought it was excellent, and well worth an hour of your time: it helped me to much better understand some of the issues discussed, in particular the feelings experienced in response to the recent issue of antisemitism in the Labour Party. It’s a book which is light on detail and critical analysis, but is most certainly an easy-to-read introduction to some of the key issues.

I was slightly distracted by quite how much of the discussion was rooted on Twitter, a platform that actively promotes outrage and strong negative emotions, though Baddiel did at least acknowledge multiple times that Twitter is not a true proxy for the ‘real world’.

Beach Read by Emily Henry

I can’t remember what made me pick up this bestselling 2020 novel, but I’m afraid it just wasn’t my kind of thing. It seemed like fairly basic romance genre fiction to me: two young adults who are ‘polar opposites’ fall in love. I found the writing uninspiring and the plot predictably leaden.

The book is enormously popular, so it clearly has merit, but it just wasn’t up my street. I came close to giving up on it, and when I decided I may as well finish it, I couldn’t manage more than a chapter per day for the last section of the book.

The two most popular quotations from this book on Goodreads are:

“When I watch you sleep,” he said shakily, “I feel overwhelmed that you exist.”

and

“I’ve never met someone who is so perfectly my favorite person.”

Both of those strike me as clunky and wooden; clearly, by virtue of their popularity, many other people feel differently. Perhaps if these quotations speak to you, the book will too. Please don’t let my lack of enthusiasm put you off.

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

In this month’s reading list email, Ryan Holiday points out that

just some twenty years ago, everyone listed their address and phone number in a phone book that was circulated to homes for free. In fact, you had to pay to NOT be included.

These days, my parents are careful about shredding everything with their address on it, even junk mail, and they’re hardly alone. How did we get here?

For much of this week, two petrol stations which are virtually opposite each other in Newcastle priced their regular diesel differently by 19.2p per litre (170.7p and 189.9p). It is surprising that a difference that big is seemingly sustainable.

I’ve been deep into automation this week: writing Microsoft Power Automate routines to automatically rename and file certain email attachments on OneDrive, and playing with Apple Shortcuts and HomeKit on personal devices. It’s years since I last played with these sorts of tools. They have become addictively straightforward and—shock—genuinely useful and time saving now that almost everything lives in the cloud.

I mentioned last week that I was enjoying Coco Mellors’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein, and I still am, but I’m now also reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The former has a line

”Running is for children and thieves”

which I think summarises my feelings on Murakami’s subject rather well, even if his enthusiasm is somewhat infectious.

Diamond Geezer wrote this week:

I don’t know about you but if there’s a long gap until the next bus I always like to walk ahead along the route until just before it eventually catches up.

I share this habit, and have long been frustrated that Citymapper doesn’t seem to automatically understand that behaviour—but discovered this week that Transit does, so I’m a convert.

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

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the vernal equinox, so…

I’m currently reading Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors, in which (at least) one of the chapters is set in Nice. Reading it made me want to visit the city again. I visited very briefly in 2018 and wasn’t all that taken with Nice, but I did take some warm-looking photographs (it was actually a bit nippy) which, I think, have had the effect of retrospectively improving my impression of the place. Maybe I’ll end up returning—and if I do, I hope I won’t be disappointed.

I’ve decided it’s spring and put the garden furniture out, which probably calls for gales next week.

A Prime Minister with a long history of using offensive and inappropriate comparisons as rhetorical flourishes is in the headlines for exhibiting that trait again. After his toadying supporters have toured the radio and television studios to tell us what The Prime Minister meant to say, we can all look forward to being told before long what a brilliant communicator he is. The merry-go-round of nonsense never stops.

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

I went for a walk in Sunderland this week, and was amazed to find a full-size sculpture of one of the Martian tripod machines from HG Wells’s War of the Worlds towering over me. I was amazed that I’d never heard about it, striking as it was, and spent a while after getting home searching the web for more information.

After initially turning up nothing, I ended up discovering that it isn’t a Martian sculpture at all, but is supposed to represent something else entirely. Most embarrassingly, I realised that I did know that this other sculpture existed, I just didn’t recognise it for what it was.

I didn’t take a picture of the sculpture, which perhaps is just as well, but if you’re near these impressive cliffs, you’re not far away from it. Hopefully, you would know it when you saw it, even if I didn’t.

There’s nothing more boring than other people’s dreams. I dreamt this week about being on a plane which was landing in heavy fog. The pilot came to sit in the main cabin, explaining that this was a new regulation for landing in fog, as human intervention in the automated landing was more frequently associated with causing disaster than averting it.

It’s made me ponder whether (or perhaps when) we’ll get to the point of banning human intervention in automated processes.

I was a couple of years late to this, but Bunga Bunga, Wondery’s nine part podcast on the political career of Silvio Berlusconi, is brilliant. Not only is the story itself simply unbelievable, Whitney Cummings’s presentation of it is perfectly pitched and laugh-out-loud hilarious while avoiding making light of serious issues. I highly recommend it.

Bus stop adverts have recently appeared for Macmillan Cancer Support, with the tagline “Whatever it takes. Donate today.”

I have a strongly negative reaction to that. People shouldn’t be donating “whatever it takes,” they shouldn’t be getting into debt to support Macmillan, they shouldn’t be diverting resources from other charities they support. It’s unduly pushy.

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

After two and a half years of subscribing, this week I reached the milestone of having funded the planting of more than 1,000 trees through Ecologi. I also found this week that I could see a breakdown of where they’d be planted: 825 in Madagascar, 136 in Mozambique, 42 in the UK, 18 in Kenya, 10 in Nicaragua and 5 in Uganda.

They even have pictures of some of them: here’s a Rowan, an Alder and a Silver Birch they planted for me in Scotland last year, none of which are species I’d have a hope of recognising even once fully grown if they weren’t labelled:

You might imagine that this would produce a warm, fuzzy feeling, but in fact it leaves me a bit conflicted. Half the stuff I read seems to say “trees are wonderful and we should plant gazillions of them” and half seems to say “mass tree planting projects destroy biodiversity and mess up the planet” (which Ecologi obviously denies). Who really knows whether I’m doing the right thing, or just assuaging my climate guilt in a way which is actually making things worse? Surely trees are basically great?

There have been flyers around town this week advertising a protest with the headline “We’ve heard enough climate change bullshit.” I’m confused as to what the protest is about. Do they think that politicians have been spouting “bullshit” while taking inadequate action? Or do they think that climate change itself is “bullshit” which doesn’t actually exist?

1: Lego streets have become worse for pedestrians and cyclists over the years, not least as cars and roads have widened at the expense of footpaths. But things are looking up.

2: I have long believed that TV detector vans were essentially distractors for more basic modes of TV detection such as looking through windows, but I was wrong: they had proper kit in them which could detect TVs and support applications for search warrants.

3: It might be time for those who peer review papers for publication to rebel.

4: One of the fundamental principles in outbreak management, and in incident management, is having clear lines of accountability. If I’m managing a multiagency outbreak, I have a little spiel on the topic that I give at the start of each incident management meeting, accountability for decisions is clearly documented in minutes and a section on “legal considerations” appears on every agenda for good measure.

And yet, when it comes to the national response, “we have not been able to identify who [in the Department of Health and Social Care] was accountable for major decisions, particularly where PPE is concerned.”

5: I walked past this van and thought: “What on earth is futsal?”

I inevitably ended up perusing the Wikipedia entry, and—having got a few paragraphs down—GCSE Spanish lessons, which often seemed to mention futsal, came flooding back.

6: There’s a line in Shuggie Bain about the smell of static electricity from TV screens, something I haven’t thought about in years. It reminded me of the unique power of olfactory memories.

7: Denis Norden, presenter of It’ll Be Alright on the Night, was the person who came up with the title Auntie’s Bloomers for the rival BBC show.

8: “The physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.” It’s a few years since I read Kalanithi’s book; this blog post reminded me of the emotional experience.

9: Some people are making their own homemade covid vaccines. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it is a curious reminder of the full range of human responses to the offer of vaccines, from outright refusal to desperate home-brewing.

10: With knowledge of the treacherous frozen slush to come, it’s sometimes difficult to feel positive about snow. Yet there is something particularly beautiful about a fresh fall, and especially about the wintery quality of light it brings.

11: “A No 10 spokesman said: ‘Going on holiday is currently illegal.’”

There are moments when a simple sentence can just tip over into crystallising a bunch of feelings into something more like thoughts, and this Government line has proven to be one of those for me.

By nature, I’m quite libertarian: I don’t really like forcing anyone to do anything. This is quite an unusual proclivity in my specialty of health protection, but one which is shared (to a greater or lesser extent) by most of my immediate colleagues. I think better results are generally achieved through persuasion than through force, though of course a public health emergency like a pandemic is always going to require a multifaceted approach.

A little over a year ago, I was nothing short of astonished when returnees from China were (to all intents and purposes) forced to quarantine at Arrowe Park hospital: I remember suggesting in conversation with colleagues that this would turn out to be a “resignation issue” for the Secretary of State. Of course, I said, we should offer people supported quarantine. Of course, we should ask all returnees to quarantine at home at the very least. But of course we can’t force people. I was wrong.

So much has happened since then, much of it to my mind ethically questionable: do we really have informed consent from all care home residents for routine covid swabbing? If not, is it really in the best interests of each individual? Are we really sure we haven’t slipped into making “best interests” decisions on behalf of populations rather than individuals?—a slippery slope indeed.

We all now live under a level of legal restriction unprecedented in modern times, perhaps concordant with an unprecedented emergency. More than a hundred thousand people have died.

And yet: there is still something which sits discomfortingly about governments using on-the-hoof extreme restrictions as opposed to established ‘emergency’ approaches such as the Civil Contingencies Act. This is even more true in an era of populism and governments who have a history of riding roughshod over constitutional convention and legal limits on executive power.

Will we really find it simple to put the genie back in the bottle?

12: I know I’ve said it already, but would you look at the quality of the light?!

13: Both this podcast episode and this book make, in passing, a very clear argument about emissions being by far the most important ecological consideration of our times, and both, in passing, unflatteringly compare with the impact of most recycling. I’m really pleased to see clear communication on this, instead of a plethora of actions referred to as ‘sustainable this’ or ‘green that’ in a way that treats every action as roughly equal. I was also pleased to see that carbon offsetting, which I do all the time, is more effective than I imagined it to be!

14: When standing before the 1777 marble statue of Armand-Thomas Hue at the Frick Collection in New York, “try as you might, you absolutely will not be able to meet his eyes. I wonder if this was Jean-Antoine Houdon’s subtle aim, as it ultimately says more about his subject and is almost more of an artistic accomplishment than what he managed with Madame His—and also because it’s what most of us spend our lives actually doing.”

15: There are tens of roads named “Bow Street” in the UK, but it seems that the BBC considers the best way of writing about a Bow Street in Wales is through reference to one of the Bow Streets in London. It’s not hard to see why coverage like this is often judged to be inappropriately London-centric.

16: Copying and pasting between Apple devices is built-in.

17: Richard Smith reckons there have been 20 re-organisations of the NHS since 1999… and he ought to know. I haven’t even tried to keep count.

18: Energy efficiency ratings for household appliances are changing.

19: On hope so much depends.

20: The Government has broken the law again.

21: How Daft Punk’s robot outfits were made.

22: Daft Punk have split. 😱

23: Spectacularly failing to learn a lesson from promising a Christmas easing of restrictions a month in advance, the Government has chosen to make itself a hostage to fortune once again by promising an easing of restrictions even more than a month in advance.

24: “Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes for both.”

25: “It will pass. All the epidemics of the past have passed. Nobody is yet clear about the effect this will have on our lives, how disruptive it will be, how much it will cost each of us. Perhaps we will review some assumptions about the free market: even the most strenuous defenders of the total freedom of the market today cry out: “The State should help us! In times of difficulty, it becomes clear that collaborating is better than competing. My secret hope is that this will be our conclusion from the current crisis. Problems are best solved together. Humankind can survive only if we work together.”

26: “Nothing can deceive like a document.”

27: Pigs can play computer games.

28: Brexit means Brexit “Your parcel is delayed due to a Brexit related disruption. We are adjusting delivery plans as quickly as possible.”

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

I’m not very loyal when it comes to early morning radio stations, but for the last few months my 6am alarm has been tuned to Times Radio Breakfast: generally, there is a snatch of laughter and banter between Callum McDonald, the Early Breakfast presenter, and Breakfast presenters Stig Abel and Aasmah Mir, which feels like a lovely way to wake up.

On Thursday morning the tone was formal and serious, and even before my brain properly engaged with the world, it was clear that something awful had happened. And days later, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine continues to horrify the world.

On Friday, feeling impotent (as I think everyone does), I tried to find out what charities I could support to help the situation. One of the most recommended was ‘Come Back Alive’, a Kyiv based charity which supplies ammunition to those defending the country. Armed defence is the only option for many Ukrainians, but I was morally torn: could I bring myself to effectively buy ammunition with the sole intention of killing soldiers?

What a luxury it is to have that dilemma, rather than feeling forced into actually killing people to defend myself. What ridiculous privilege I expend by writing these words and taking up your attention with my petty dilemmas while others are senselessly losing loved ones.

A little over a year ago, Wendy and I bought a new tumble dryer, the previous one having stopped working after 7½ years. We tried to buy the most ecologically sound model we could find, and it also happened to have a Wi-Fi connection.

We were most amused: why would anyone want their dryer to surf the web?

A year on, I’ve been won over. It is amazingly convenient to have an app which shows how long the cycle has to run, and push notifications to signal that the cycle has finished beat annoying beeps hands-down.

Forgiveness is hard. Forgiveness has been a recurrent theme in my reading this week, and it has made me think. Before I really thought about it, I would have said that I was a pretty forgiving person. But the more I reflect, the more I think about those very few people who I would describe as having “antibodies” towards, and I wonder if those “antibodies” mean that I haven’t completely forgiven them for things in our shared past.

These are all people who were in positions of professional seniority above me who have behaved poorly towards me in the past. They all, I now realise, demonstrated some form of very brief, petty and unnecessary aggression against me, for which they never apologised. I’ve never recognised that common link before.

So perhaps I’m holding onto grudges without realising it, especially in those narrow circumstances. Perhaps I need to be better at appreciating others’ capacity to learn, grow, and leave bullying behaviours behind.

I have just four books to tell you about this month.

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Rooney’s 2017 bestselling debut is one of those books that is so wildly popular and widely read that writing about it seems redundant. In fact, I thought I’d read this book some years ago, shortly after I read Normal People. But I think I was confused: I read Rooney’s short story Mr Salary a couple of months after that.

I didn’t especially enjoy Normal People, finding it a bit flat and claustrophobic, and I didn’t think much of Mr Salary either, finding the dialogue unconvincing. Yet, I enjoyed Conversations with Friends.

As you almost certainly already know, the plot concerns two University students (former lovers) who form a friendship with an older married couple, and the complex web of relationships which develops between the four of them.

For what it’s worth, I still think Rooney’s dialogue is astonishingly unrealistic given how widely praised it is: this is a novel where everyone talks in sentences and paragraphs, and can spontaneously express complex thoughts and feelings with immediate precision. But this book did have a lot going for it in terms of characterisation and emotional complexity.

All things considered, I enjoyed this book enough to seek out the newly published Beautiful World, Where Are You.

How to be Perfect by Michael Schur

This is a recently published “popular philosophy” book by the writer of the television comedy series The Good Place. I picked it up mostly because I enjoyed that series.

The book is a guided tour of some schools of thought on ethics and philosophy, along with (mostly humorous) examples of how these relate to everyday life. I found the discussion mostly superficial, which is really a result of the structure and the decision to cram so much into a short book.

The writing style was, for my liking, far too conversational in tone, to the point where I slightly struggled to understand parts and had to go back and mentally “read them aloud” to parse what Schur was trying to say. I found that annoying.

This just wasn’t up my street (which, as you’ll see, is a bit of a theme this month: poor choices abound).

All of that said, the last chapter—concerning apologies—was a cut above the rest. It’s quite disconnected from the rest of the book, and while I still found the writing style a bit painful, I think this chapter could be published and well-received as a separate essay.

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

This 2018 gender-swapped reworking of Pretty Woman is not my usual sort of novel, but I wanted something light and easy after a run of slightly dull books that I’d struggled through.

This fits that bill. While it was never going to be a book I’d love, I appreciated its straightforward plot and implausible but easy-to-follow dialogue. The characters were lightly sketched, as was appropriate for the plot. Unfortunately, I couldn’t help but repeatedly misread the main character’s name, Stella Lane, as Stena Line, which often made me laugh.

This novel has spawned a couple of sequels: this didn’t have enough of an effect on me to consider picking them up, but that’s no real criticism given that I knew it wasn’t my usual kind of novel when I bought it.

Broken People by Sam Lansky

Published in 2020, this Is Sam Lansky’s semi-autobiographical novel about coming to terms with our own past. The plot concerns a character—also called Sam—working with a shaman who offers ‘open-soul surgery’ which fixes ‘everything that it is wrong with you’ in three days.

I thought this was an interesting concept, but the book didn’t quite live up to it. I suppose I was hoping, in the end, for a discussion on how the process didn’t work, and how life and our own interaction with our past is altogether more complex than the conceit suggests. Unfortunately, Lansky delivers the opposite.

The ‘surgery’ consists of drug-fuelled trips into angsty memories, with superficial (and really quite dull) reflections on how they have shaped the present character, somehow leading to a positive and hopeful outcome. I didn’t find myself drawn into the process or the plot more broadly.

This just wasn’t really my cup of tea.

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

Following last week’s earth-shattering news about my toothbrush, I bought a new Sonicare number this week. It’s fancy. I’ve used the Philips dental care recycling scheme for some time to recycle my toothbrush heads, interdental brushes and floss packaging, despite having no Philips dental products, so it seemed right to support them.

I finished my work notebook yesterday, and cracked open a new one this morning. I use an A4 spiral bound hardback Black n’ Red book, and use exactly one page per day, writing the date top-right. All the inserts of inspirational quotes are brutally torn out before I start using the notebook, as I find them intensely irritating.

I mostly use my notebook for writing down my schedule for the day (to keep it handy) and any jobs I need to do (to make sure I tick them off). I also write occasional scribbles of things I need to not forget. I buy the notebooks in packs of five, but rarely get to use more than one of the pack as Wendy steals them, as she uses notebooks at a much faster rate.

I’ve tried many electronic alternatives over the years, but have never found anything to rival the “look down, and it’s there” accessibility of a physical notebook. I do keep future tasks and appointments electronically, but “today” works best on paper for me. It’s also great for those “did I remember to do that?” moments, when I can flick back and see a task ticked off.

Following last week’s positive covid test, I never did go on to develop any symptoms, though did remain positive for a little while. Working from home all week and never leaving the house was a strange experience, but not wholly unpleasant. I’ve missed my walks to work, and I still haven’t got round to reading much this month.

Rumours abound that the Government will announce a substantial change to the covid response tomorrow, apparently to include the end of the legal requirement to self-isolate and the end of access to free testing. I haven’t been able to get this bit from Stuart Heritage’s Air Mail profile of the Prime Minister out of my head all week:

He is apparently telling colleagues that he “got Covid done.” Just like he got Brexit done. And that worked out O.K., didn’t it?

Ho-hum.

I finished watching After Life this week. I had avoided the series for years, thinking that it wasn’t up my street, but it turned out to be brilliant.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The sixth post of a series inspired by Jonathan Rothwell.

I got an email this week from a certain multinational company in which my correspondent was “really sorry to tell you the sad news” that replacement heads for my electric toothbrush are being discontinued.

“We know you are a regular toothbrush user and know that this is disappointing.”

This may be the platonic ideal of a first world problem.

This week, I overheard an annual appraisal for someone working for an IT firm, being conducted (unduly loudly) in a public place. The appraisee was asked about their personal development plan and responded that they’d struggled to work out what to include. The appraiser suggested that it can be helpful to include a plan to attend courses for things that are regular familiar tasks: sometimes people can develop bad habits which a bit of refresher training can help to correct, and occasionally people pick up shortcuts they’ve not previously discovered.

My initial reaction to this was that it was insightful advice that I’d never considered, and which is probably transferable to medicine.

Half an hour or so later, it dawned on me that while the advice was interesting, it was completely the wrong response to the point the appraisee was making. The appraisee had raised uncertainty about what professional skills they’d like to develop, and instead of exploring that topic, the appraiser just dispensed a bit of off-the-cuff “how to tick the box” advice. The appraiser had effectively shown a complete lack of interest in the skill development, and career development, of the appraisee.

It surprised me that it took me so long to notice this, and made me worry that maybe I do similar things at times in my own job. Hopefully, this experience will remind me not to.

After two years of pandemic, I’ve finally tested positive for covid for the very first time. I have no symptoms and was testing before visiting family, like a model citizen. I’m also open to all jokes about my lack of symptoms being attributable to me having no sense of taste to lose.

I know Wordless stats are dull, but I’d been successful in my first 43 days of playing, and was peeved this week to fall at the 44th hurdle (frame).