1: Talking about how to influence politicians, Professor Dame Sally Davies told the HSJ ”You’ve got to think ‘where are they coming from’ and frame the issues so it has salience for them.” When I was lucky enough to work alongside her, I learned a huge amount from just watching how Sally worked. It still strikes me as notable that many doctors take the approach she describes with their patients but don’t do the same in political discussion. 

2: Leaving portfolios until the end of the appraisal/CPD year is a bad idea. This isn’t really a lesson specific to this year, but I never seem to learn it regardless. 

3: Some days are longer and busier than others. 

4: In Grandeur and Greed, Giles Smith refers to Bassano’s painting The Animals Entering Noah’s Ark as having “the worst depiction of an elephant in any exhibited artwork in a major gallery”. It took me a while to spot it, which rather says it all: I think he might be right. 

5: It’s always lovely to reconnect with an old friend. 

6: Just as the first casualty of war is truth, the first casualty of pandemics is common sense. 

7: The more intensely I work, the more I lose perspective. This is a useful trait, great for total immersion in complex projects, for trying to untangle a complicated outbreak or for trying to make a useful and structured text from lots of conflicting ideas. But I’m learning that it’s not a helpful trait when working intensely to others’ plans, because it’s easy to become fixated on the flaws and fault lines of my little corner rather than seeing the bigger picture taking shape. Rest helps to restore perspective. 

8: I’m not sure whether I actually learned anything from it, but David Marchese’s interview with Aaron Sorkin in The New York Times Magazine was brilliant. 

9: I’ve learned what book reviewers think is the point of book reviews. 

10: Being woken in the middle of the night when on call seems to get even less fun each time it happens, and covid-19 means it is happening a lot. 

11: Sleeping for 12-and-a-half hours straight is still a thing that happens when I’m tired enough. 

12: The Electoral Commission recommends postponing the May elections until the autumn, and I’m surprised by how conflicted I feel about that. 

13: Mind-gardening is a thing. Apparently. 

14: I can’t remember the last time a cartoon stopped me in my tracks like this one by Ella Baron. 

15: Philippe Descamps’s article in Le Monde Diplo on cycling in Copenhagen was interesting—particularly the bit about having predictable provision according to the road’s speed limit. The article suggests that only 6% of daily journeys in Copenhagen are on foot, which I suspect is an artefact of the definition of “journey”: almost everyone will walk some distance on foot each day, and on the occasions when I’ve visited Copenhagen, I’ve enjoyed the fact that provision for pedestrians is as thoughtfully considered as the provision for cyclists. 

16: Despite it being (apparently) very commonly taught in schools and universities, it is only at the age of 34 that I’ve first heard of the “five paragraph essay”. 

17: The good people of Newcastle are, it seems, panic-buying chicken. 

18: Snail facials are exactly what they sound like. According to Race Across the World, there are 52 species of hummingbird in Costa Rica. This came as a particular surprise to me as I thought ‘hummingbird’ was a species. I know nothing. 

19: Even a fairly crude “guy walks into a bar joke” can be a delight when it’s well written. 

20: I usually walk to work: it takes a little under an hour, which is only a little longer than it takes by Metro or car. Today I learned that if the rest of the world self-isolates, it actually only takes nine minutes to drive. 

21: Traveling from London to Mallorca by train, foot and ship is easier, but less environmentally efficient, than I’d have guessed. 

22: I’ve never thought before about the fact that escalator machinery on the London Underground wears unevenly because of “the weight of those who dutifully stand on the right”. 

23: This time three months ago, I thought it was extraordinary that a Government would remove the right of citizens to live and work in any country in the EU. Never did I imagine a British Government could remove citizens’ rights to the extent that they have to stay indoors. I’m living in extraordinary times. 

24: Most of the time, letters responding to articles in medical journals add very little. Sometimes, though, they add completely new insights which change my perspective on an issue: pointing out that health improvement interventions that go along with screening tests are usually ignored in analyses of the effectiveness of screening programmes is a great example. 

25: I don’t think I’ve ever seen an episode of Doctors. 

26: There’s a reason why it feels strange to walk on a stopped escalator. 

27: It’s been too long since I last listened to Reply All. 

28: “Self-sacrifice has always been an implicit part of being a doctor. It is a source of both pride and pain, and why, on the whole, doctors and nurses deserve our respect. Rarely has it been so called upon as in the covid-19 crisis.” 

29: It’s tough to be a spy in a country in covid-19 lockdown. 

30: An article by Peter Blegvad in the latest Brixton Review of Books made me think quite a lot about the relative accuracy of each of imagination, observation and memory: a theme explored in quite a few novels I’ve read, but which I don’t think I’d really considered in art before. 

31: “Pineapple is the smell of masculine.” Apparently. 

As snobbish as it may sound, I’m not typically a RyanAir kind of person: I prefer the sort of travelling where I’m treated with civility and allowed to relax with my own thoughts or a good book.

Yet I also love a bargain. When I saw a couple of weeks ago that RyanAir had sub-£20 fares available from Edinburgh to Copenhagen for a weekend when Wendy was on nights, I found it impossible to resist. Living in Newcastle, I had actually never flown from Edinburgh before. However, Wendy and I had been re-routed there once when an inbound flight from a weekend trip was cancelled, and it had seemed remarkably straightforward to transfer from airport to East Coast Mainline and home, and I assumed that would work almost as smoothly in reverse. The assumption proved accurate, and so last weekend, I found myself aurally assaulted by fanfares, exhortations to buy scratchcards and special offers on cheap perfumes as I jetted across the North Sea.

It was a flying trip in another sense, too: I arrived at Kastrup airport in the late afternoon. By the time I had caught the train to the central station, Københavns Hovedbanegård, and walked the 20 minutes to my Sydhavnen hotel, the sun was setting—and my flight home was little more than 24 hours away. But no matter: I had really only come from a cheap-ish day out.

Early the following morning, after a quick breakfast at Joe & the Juice at the Fisketorvet mall (there go the hipster credentials I never had to begin with), I strolled along the east bank of the harbour. I have visited Copenhagen only once before, and while that longer trip allowed get around more of the city, even crossing the impressive Øresund bridge to Malmö, it was during the winter. As I wandered by the water, I was a little struck by how much livelier Copenhagen was during the summer, with seemingly much of the city out for a Sunday constitutional, and much of the rest taking out boats on the sparkling harbour waters.

I eventually found myself at Operaen, Copenhagen’s famous opera house. On my previous visit, I had seen this only from across the water: it is more impressive close up. While architecturally rather different in style and scale, the waterside situation and protruding roof reminded me of the Senedd in Cardiff. If I’d taken anything other than a horrendous selfie, I’d insert a picture here to prove my point; but you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Doubling back on myself, I crossed the river to the tourist hotspot of multicoloured buildings that is Nyhaven. This was much less pleasant in the summer: it was so crowded with tourists that it was difficult to walk along! Although, my winter visit here had been rewarded by a bird depositing it’s “lime” on my jumper: the lack of that experience this time around was a welcome variation.

I made my way down to Tivoli, the theme park and pleasure gardens celebrating its 175th anniversary this year. Although a little more compact than I expected, this was a real pleasure: Tivoli has done a wonderful job of maintaining its heritage while also modernising enough to attract a modern audience. This is something that I think we struggle with in the UK, as “heritage” often seems to be misconstrued as “old fashioned”. There was nothing old-fashioned about Tivoli: the beautiful old surroundings were integrated into the modern experience in a way that didn’t fetishise them as being part of an old world.

I was also struck and pleased by the integration of classical music and dance into the entertainment at Tivoli. The stunning pantomime theatre, with its incredible mechanical peacock tail curtain, is used for several-times-daily performances of ballet with a live pit orchestra, attracting very large crowds (far larger than the small seating area in the picture!)

As I sat in these beautiful surroundings sipping a gin and tonic, I couldn’t help but reflect on how different the experience was to that one finds a Blackpool Pleasure Beach: a similarly aged theme park, with a similarly bold heritage, with a similar number of visitors annually. For all the charm of Blackpool, it’s hard to imagine finding quiet garden to enjoy a relaxing gin and tonic. And while Tivoli’s famous wooden Bjergbanen rollercoaster and its looping steel Daemonen would fit perfectly alongside Blackpool’s Grand National and Icon, a notable orchestra’s performance being heavily promoted as a prime attraction seems unlikely at the Pleasure Beach.

This strikes me as a little bit sad, because I think it reflects how the performing arts (and perhaps arts more generally) have moved away from being part of the centre of British culture in a way that clearly hasn’t happened in Denmark. Given the UK’s stellar history in the field, it seems a shame that dance and orchestral music have become a little removed from our daily lives.

After a while of sitting and relaxing, I was a little startled to look up and find myself confronted by children in solider’s uniforms, complete with bearskins. I began to wonder if I had drunk more than I’d clocked, but it turned out that this was the Tivoli Youth Guard, a formation of 8 to 16 year-olds that parade around and ‘guard’ some of the prominent monuments and buildings. While these are much sought-after and prestigious positions for the children involved, I have to confess to feeling a little uncomfortable about the whole thing. I suppose the whole thing felt a little reminiscent of tens of child abuse scandals reported in recent years. Perhaps the fact that I couldn’t watch a parade of children without a slight uneasiness might also reflect an innocence lost in British culture, or perhaps just within me.

After a quick visit to Tivoli’s Wagamama (there go those hipster credentials again), it was time to leave the comfortable surrounds of Tivoli, hop across the road to Københavns Hovedbanegård and begin the journey back to Newcastle. My bargain summer day-trip was sunny and relaxing, but also perhaps a little more reflective than I had expected it to be.

The pictures in this post are all my own.