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| Candy floss clouds above Christchurch Harbour - taken by a friend from Royal Bournemouth Hospital |
Thursday September 3rd
A dreary day. Mild
but cloudy with occasional drizzle. Now
some days since last diary entry. As you
can see, from the above opening line of my diary, I did not think it worth
starting the blog with a weather report, hence the ‘Cripping Up’ story.
Lindsay has been unwell with a ‘bug’ she obviously caught
from the grandchildren, but we did get a postal Covid test, which came back
negative today. Otherwise, with the
reduction in test facilities now actioned, she would have had to drive to
Dorchester. Mildy amusing to hear that
the App telling people where to go for a test works on a ‘as the crow flies’
basis; hence some unfortunates in North Devon being advised to attend in Barry,
South Wales – just a few miles across the Bristol Channel!
Golf yesterday, ‘Celtic Nations’ versus ‘England’ at
Parkstone Golf Club. A bit of fun really,
but not sure how several members of other nationalities qualified to play, e.g.
an Italian. Chuffed to come from behind
with the last four holes in one under par to beat the opposition. Met a friend and medical colleague in the car
park. Explained about Lindsay. ‘You should get into the Oxford study’, he
said. ‘We get tested twice a month. We get paid twenty-five quid a time’, he
added helpfully.
Friday September 4th
A consultant at UCH when I was a student, who shall remain
nameless, was a very testy and impatient Welshman. His teaching style was aggressive and
impatient. One could say he did not
suffer fools gladly. He was however,
needless to say, highly respected in his own field. He was also extremely old fashioned in his
approach to medicine. Knowing this, I
bided my time, and having been upbraided on at least one occasion for not
knowing something, I stood by as he berated one of my ‘firm’ for not knowing
the dose of pethidine to give a patient suffering from renal colic. ‘Well’, he turned to me, peering at my name
badge; ‘McLeod. What dose would you
give?’ ‘A quarter of a grain, sir’, I
replied. He recoiled as if he had been
shot. ‘A quarter of a grain’, he
repeated. ‘How did you know that?’ ‘I thought everybody knew that was the
correct dose, sir.’ ‘Very good, very
good.’ He was almost smiling. ‘If only we still worked in proper doses. Yes, a quarter of a grain. What is that in modern medicine?’ ‘Fifteen milligrams, sir.’ He turned to the small group. ‘One of the most painful conditions in
medical practice. Make sure you give
enough analgesia.’ End of session. I forbore to tell him that the only second-hand
edition of Bailey and Love’s Practice of Surgery that I had been able to afford
still had the old doses of drugs to use alongside the metric equivalents.
A lovely episode that occurred later on with the same
consultant, was when one of my friends, a mischievous individual who was an
outstanding folk guitar player, and who should never have been doing medicine,
was his House Surgeon. In those days, during
surgery, the diathermy device for cauterising blood vessels and cutting through
tissue was connected to a floor pedal consisting of squishy white rubber. When you stood on it, a high pitched squeak
came from the device and the connection was made, shortly to be accompanied by
the smell of barbecuing human tissue.
The operation was a Millin prostatectomy. On the first application of the diathermy,
the surgeon inadvertently trod on the squishy surgical wellington boot of my
friend, who instantly responded by mimicking the high pitched squeak. The surgeon tried again. Again a squeak, but no cautery. ‘Damn thing’, muttered the surgeon under his
breath and tried again. Same
response. His Welsh accent much to the
fore now, he was heard to say something like ‘Bloody useless thing’. Eventually, after multiple attempts, ‘Sister,
get me a new diathermy.’ The sister, who
had realised what was going on, calmly pushed my friend’s boot out of the way
and moved over the pedal. ‘Try that one,
sir’, she said sweetly. Snap, crackle,
pop – diathermy! Surreptitious chuckles. Some years ago, I searched in the medical
register for my friend’s name, but he was not listed. He was one of those individuals from a
medical family in whom it was expected that he study medicine, but for which he
was not ideally suited. Before coming up
to Cambridge he had been a roadie for Barclay James Harvest, so perhaps he
eventually went back to his roots.
I was reminded of the quarter of a grain story when watching
a short feature on TV the other night concerning the release of medical papers
in the case of the death of George the Fifth.
Fifty years after his death in 1936, the personal papers of Lord Dawson,
the King’s physician, revealed that Dawson had eased the King’s suffering
(official cause of death: bronchitis) by injecting morphia ¾gr and cocaine 1gr
into the King’s ‘distended jugular vein’.
As you may now calculate, having read the preamble, 45mg of morphine
i.v. is probably enough to kill a horse, let alone a king… The issue resurfaced
because a programme entitled ‘Royal Murder Mysteries’ promises to investigate
the death of the King’s sister, Queen Maud of Norway, in 1938. This occurred relatively soon, unexpectedly,
and suddenly after abdominal surgery during a visit to the UK. Her physician? Lord Dawson.
It is an interesting fact that up until our present queen,
every member of the Royal family to take the throne in the 20th
century has been killed by smoking.
Life meanders on.
Riots in the USA as yet another black male is shot by police (seven
times in the back as he was getting into his car); more polarisation as the
re-election campaign gets under way.
Various quarantines from a number of countries, all rather confusing. My daughter was due to compete in a mountain
bike event in northern Norway but has had to cancel because UK citizens are
required to quarantine in Norway for 14 days if they travel to the country. On the plus side, it meant that she and her
partner came and stayed with us last weekend and enjoyed perfect weather and
some very rugged off-road riding in Purbeck.
An opportunity to drool over their bikes – Canyon carbon gravel bikes
with a twelve cog cassette and SRAM electric gear shifters…
Monday September 7th
An advantage of living in Poole is that friends and family
like to visit. Not necessarily because
of our scintillating company, but also because it’s just a great place to
be. Seaside, coastal walks, cycling,
pubs, etc. My other daughter and her
partner appeared last weekend and we enjoyed their company. Leaving them to their own friends and devices
on Sunday, we walked with other friends up in North Dorset, enjoying some
autumnal sunshine, views over the Blackmore Vale, and the appearance in the
hedgerows of rose hips and sloes. An
unusual location for a sign concerning social distancing was noted in the
churchyard of St Mary’s in the tiny hamlet of Turnworth – in juxtaposition of
two his and hers graves. Presumably
however, they were in the same social bubble?
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| Social Distancing Required? Very strict rules in Turnworth |
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| But beautiful wild cyclamen beneath a yew tree |
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| Sloes and rose hips |
Wednesday 9th September
The last few days have accentuated that dying autumnal feel,
with drowsing warm sunshine, and a temperature climbing to 22 deg C. In the mornings it has felt cool and
fresh. Definite upsurge in coronavirus
cases with a suggestion this morning that the government is to introduce a ban
on gatherings of more than six people.
Minor setback for vaccination studies because a participant has become
ill. No details as yet (subsequently
revealed to be transverse myelitis; definitely concerning in view of some of
the Guillain-Barré cases seen with some vaccines in the past). We all seem to be in a bubble which waits for
– what? A catastrophic burst? There really is no feel of normality coming
back at all. After the euphoria of the
dramatic drop in cases with the initial lockdown strategy, we seem to be in the
‘phony war’ phase of waiting and wondering what will be next. A virologist on the news this morning points
out that we commonly become reinfected by the ‘common’ cold, much of which is
due to coronaviruses, and there are now documented cases of Covid-19
reinfection, albeit with subtly changed virus molecular structure. But perhaps natural selection will happen, or
at least random selection, and a less serious derivative of the original virus
will begin to circulate. Or, could it be
the other way round?
I feel reasonably resilient and fatalistic about things
today. It would be easy to believe, as
in Thoreau’s words, that ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’ and
to succumb to a sort of ‘status morbidus’.
I did have some of these feelings when, with time on my hands, I read an
obituary of someone who had never previously crossed my horizon, namely David
Graeber. Alongside an obituary of commando
Moss Berryman, a sailor whose exploits in a disguised Japanese fishing vessel
in attaching limpet mines to Japanese shipping in Singapore (Operation Jaywick),
I would ordinarily only have glanced at Mr Graeber’s entry. Only 59, and described as a ‘prominent
anarchist’, my attention would normally have wandered immediately. But Graeber was an original thinker, who came
to widespread attention when he published “On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs:
A work rant” in a radical feminist magazine called Strike! He wrote, ‘In the
year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that by century’s end, technology
would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the
United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was
right. In technological terms we are
quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t
happen. Instead, technology has been
marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be
created that are, effectively pointless.
Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend
their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really
need to be performed.’ These would truly
be men (and women) who lead lives of ‘quiet desperation.’ Graeber expanded his views into a book. His speciality was “Value Theory” – how
societies decide what it important. With
a few exceptions, he argued, modern economies value jobs in almost inverse
proportion to their social worth: compare the salaries of advertising execs and
PR men with those of bin men, builders, nurses, teacher, and carers, and then
ask how society would fare if one group or the other were to disappear. The forced pretence that many “bullshit jobs”
are useful takes a huge emotional toll on those who do them. The epidemiologist, Michael Marmot and his
team have shown that work stress, and particularly a lack of personal control
over one’s job, are factors which directly or indirectly, lead to an increased
incidence of coronary artery disease.
Much of the above re David Graeber is taken directly from
the Daily Telegraph obituary, and I acknowledge it completely. Food for thought however.
Scattered bits of news around, mostly bad, including the
shooting of a year 11 pupil by another, a 15-year-old, begging the question of
how he had access to a gun.
No such puzzlement in the wonderful United States of America
where terrifying pictures emerge of right wing activists in a standoff with
Black Lives Matter activists, both groups armed to the teeth, outside the racecourse
at Churchill Downs, Kentucky during the belated running of the Kentucky
Derby. Surprising to hear that no
shooting took place. That Second
Amendment to the U.S. constitution has probably taken more lives than those
lost in war by that same country – and if I’m wrong on that, it must be a
‘damned close run thing.’
Tuesday 15th September
“Nostalgia’s great but it’s not what it was”. Don’t know why this came to mind, but age and
Covid make one nostalgic. To give this
witticism its attribution, I remember this appearing in the Sunday Times
sometime in the 1960s or 1970s. The
author was ‘AFGL’. This and other
witticisms and puns were the work of Alan Frederick Grantley Lewis (thank you,
Google), whose works appeared collected in a book called ‘Pundemonium’. Another example:
‘I feel so strongly
About loo graffiti
That I’ve signed
A partition.’
I suppose his modern equivalent is Brian Bilston (q.v.), who
is known as ‘The Poet Laureate of the Internet.’
From time to time I enjoy pop nostalgia, particularly Tony
Blackburn’s ‘Sounds of the Sixties’, which often helps me to get off to
sleep. My hypothesis is that the songs heard
during one’s formative years are those that one thinks are the best. There are undoubtedly a few around today of
the Snowflake generation who will feel that Beyonce or Adele have been the
finest interpreters of the popular song, or even some of the rappers, whose
names sound to me like drug pushers, at least those of them who haven’t been
shot or overdosed. But the development
of the modern pop song, where lyrics as well as a musical hook were all
important, started surely in the 50s and 60s?
When Gerry Goffin (q.v.) died, his former musical writing partner (and one-time
spouse), Carol King, said that his genius lay in his unerring ability to
express in a few words what teenagers were trying to articulate about love and
relationships and were themselves unable to say. (That is a loose parenthesis of what she did
say, because I can’t remember it exactly).
When his skills were allied with King’s classical pianistic training,
the result was innumerable hit songs.
‘Will you still love me tomorrow?’ is a good example of their first
attempts at song-writing, with an interesting chord progression into minor
keys, but the others are legion.
I was reminded of Sounds of the Sixties, because recently,
Tony played a song by P.J.Proby, his version of ‘Somewhere’, the magnificent
song by Leonard Bernstein from West Side Story.
I have always enjoyed PJP’s version of this, though those who read this
and are tempted to check it out on YouTube or Spotify will almost certainly be
aghast. But it is partly the
extraordinarily tortured diction of his version that I like, and the reality
that somewhere, inside that, there is
a magnificent voice trying to get out.
Poor P.J. Proby’s career came to an abrupt end when, during his stage
act, dressed in a cowboy version of a tight velvet suit, his trousers
split. Exactly the same thing happened
on a second occasion, suggesting that it was a deliberate ploy to excite the
young female fans. Cue a massive
reaction of revulsion in the press and exit Proby stage left. I believe that although he originally came
from Texas, he is currently still alive and living in modest council
accommodation somewhere to the north
of London.
We have been enjoying wonderful calm, settled, and warm
sunny weather in Poole, though my Edinburgh friends have had less luck. Golf, both here, and at Denham, has been
wonderful. At Denham, with the Scottish
Medical Golfing Society, there is it seems, much pessimism among my colleagues
about the prolonged Covid experience which most agree will be with us for a
very long time.
I have been intending for some time to revisit the location
(with the exception of my first postnatal six months in Hong Kong) of my first
three or four years of life. This was in
a remote valley between Salisbury and Romsey, in a place called Dean Hill. In the 1930s, as Britain re-armed, it was
decided that there was too much risk in placing munition storage close to
dockyards. Between West Dean and East
Dean, adjacent to the main line railway, and to the north of a steep chalk
escarpment, the Department of Armament Supply (DAS), for whom my father worked,
imported miners and engineers and dug huge tunnels into the hillside to store
mines, torpedoes, and shells. It had its
own 2’6” railway, and the ordnance was then transported to the Navy in Gosport
and Portsmouth. We eventually found the
remote village of West Dean – it still feels rural in 2020; what it must have
felt like in 1948 who knows – and enjoyed a ride in a big loop of still
unspoilt countryside, eventually topping out on a ridge to the north
overlooking Salisbury plain and Porton Down.
Berries, sloes and hips in profusion.
Dean Hill still exists, a small industrial park, the typical MoD fence
and the two story redbrick flat-roofed admiralty buildings an unmistakable
signature of a bygone age.
The last week or so has seen some nostalgic activity on
television concerning the 80th anniversary of the Battle of
Britain. The son of my father in law’s
old squadron leader is an actor who has fairly strong left leaning views (he
spends a lot of time ‘resting’), but his writings on Facebook are often
enjoyable, even if they are sometimes unprintable. He unearths some remarkable stuff, e.g., and
here I was going to give an example, but Facebook have deleted his post! It was a pretentious arty piece of writing,
that in the old days would have been a good entry to Private Eye’s Pseuds
Corner feature, with Peter’s trenchant comments appended.
As a postscript to this entry, I report that we have been
enjoying some fantastic sport recently, particularly the cricket (England v
Australia), but especially the Tour de France, which this year is a remarkably
open affair, with the yellow, green, polka dot, and white jerseys changing
hands frequently, though at the time of writing, the Slovenian Primos Roglic
looks the best bet for yellow in Paris.
Less enjoyably, but still addictively, the dear old Premier League of
football has restarted. I report this
because of a gobsmacking moment the other evening when watching Newcastle
play. In their first game of the season
versus West Ham, Callum Wilson (purchased from Bournemouth) put the ball in the
net. From my left on the sofa came these
words from my normally well-spoken and mild mannered wife: ’So why couldn’t you
do that for Bournemouth, you twat?’ The
difference between Le Tour and football, as someone put it, is that when
injured, footballers roll over and over and pretend they can’t carry on; and
cyclists roll over and over and pretend that they can carry on. Give me Le Tour any day. From the helicopter shots one can always plan
one’s next holiday in France too.
Just taken a call from our GP surgery. My wife has back pain, and would like a
referral to the rheumatologist she has seen before. The surgery has indicated that a GP
consultation will be required, and they were ringing to book one, by telephone
only, in a week’s time. Pathetic.
Friday 18th September
Sad news earlier this week when the friend I spoke of
earlier died from the spread of her colonic cancer. It was proof that Facebook can be a source
for good in that her husband posted a sober but laudatory note, and
subsequently a montage of some of her finest moments. Truly a person who loved life, and the
comments from all of her friends and colleagues on the site were a testament to
her.
The Indian Summer has continued. Global warming is good (so far) for us,
though not so good if you happen to live in Oregon or California which are
alight with wildfires. When playing golf
the other evening in balmy temperatures, as the sun went down we were besieged
by mosquitoes, and I wondered when it would be that malaria re-emerges in the
UK. In the distant past (well, certainly
up to the end of the 19th century), the ‘ague’ was not uncommon in
marshy or low lying areas, chiefly the fens, East Anglia, and Kent, and
curiously was due exclusively to Plasmodium Vivax, the less deadly form of the
disease. Worldwide, Plasmodium
Falciparum is the main cause of mortality.
Many theories exist as to the cause of the decline in English malaria,
none entirely conclusive, and my experience the other evening suggests that it
might return. Parkstone Golf Club has
plenty of wetland habitat for breeding of midges and mosquitoes.
Evening at Parkstone Golf Club
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| Poole Harbour & 7th Hole, Parkstone G.C., evening |
Another friend has commenced chemo for metastatic cancer.
My time as a Governor at Poole Hospital is drawing to a
close. The two local trusts will merge
and become University Hospitals Dorset on 1st October. There is boundless optimism among the
executives responsible for the secondary phase of healthcare. I may possibly continue to try to contribute,
though the Zoom meeting style of governance doesn’t really encourage a
querying, questioning, challenging attitude to the steamroller of optimism. What we mustn’t lose sight of is that our
health service is not the envy of the world. It has strengths, but it also has drawbacks,
and it seems to me that a radical revision of health care delivery is needed,
particularly in primary care. There
seems to be a generation of doctors, maybe accelerated by the ‘hands off’
approach during Covid, who won’t be able or indeed be inclined, to properly
examine a patient any more. I would love
to go back to bedside teaching, but will that ever be a feature of training
again?
Evening blackberrying at Corfe Castle
I must get back to my book club book – ‘An Officer and a
Spy’, by Robert Harris; an account of the Dreyfuss affair, which I have never
properly understood, so I am looking forward to learning more about it.
Sunday September 20th
Yesterday was our morning gym class, warm ups, stretching, and
circuits, and very tough it was too. It
now takes longer to recover from vigorous exercise, so I feel very justified in
relaxing, reading, solving the cryptic crossword, and watching the final time
trial of the Tour de France. The result
is electrifying. Tadej Pogačar takes the
stage by nearly two minutes, and in the process wins the entire race from
Primož Roglič, who has worn the maillot
jaune for most of the race. The
newspapers today liken it to a Devon Loch moment (q.v.), or a cycling version of
Jean van de Velde’s collapse at Carnoustie in the 1999 Open Golf Championship.
In the evening we watch the second instalment of ‘Des’, the
dramatization of the case of Dennis Nilsen, the serial killer. Nilsen is played with remarkable and
jaw-dropping insouciance by David Tennant, who looks identical to the real
character. It is impossible to get
insight into this man though, at least insofar as episode two, and I suspect,
episode three are concerned. Perhaps
more interesting is to speculate on what drew Brian Masters, the author, to the
story and to his other books on serial killers.
Was it money? Was it just morbid
curiosity? Was it his
homosexuality? I rather suspect Masters
is a man with an eye for the main chance.
Enough of Nilsen. I
feel slightly depressed as we walk in a large circuit around Bournemouth and
the beaches. The people seem to be fat, grubby,
smoking, earnestly playing crazy golf, or drinking (it is only 11 am), and sit
in the beach bars and restaurants in an unconcerned sort of way. Some of the waiters and waitresses are wearing
masks, but not all. When we walk up Alum
Chine, the notice on the pedestrian bridge, covered in verdigris proudly
announces that Bournemouth Town Council opened this in 1924, but there is
litter and overgrowth of creepers, ivy, and bracken. Everything looks so shoddy. Unremoved dead leaves litter the pavements
and gutters. Perhaps this follows a
sequence: we learn from the Andrew Marr show this morning that Britons are the
worst in Europe for following rules.
Trying to salvage some likeable national character from the detritus, I
suppose it is because we are stubborn, suspicious, inherently
anti-authoritarian. Querulous and questioning;
but are these good traits or merely a sign of a civilization in decline – even if
it ever reached an acme?
The depressed feeling is accentuated by my book. Poor Colonel Picquart, will he come to a good
end or a bad end? The injustice of the
frame-up of poor Dreyfus eats into you after a while. But I wouldn’t discourage anyone from reading
‘An Officer and a Spy’; it’s an excellent book.
Typically, the author of the historical novel can’t resist putting in a
few topical though barely credible details.
The protagonist attends a cello recital by the young Pablo Casals; he is at the first
performance of Debussy’s ‘Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune’; he used to go to
a church where César Franck was the organist; and finally he is a regular
visitor to the Wagner festivals in Bayreuth.
With regard to civilisation, I think I will end my diary for
this entry as follows:
The United States of America is the only nation to have gone
from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilisation.
I have not put this in quotation marks because it exists in
many different forms, and credit for it has been laid at the door of many, many
people. For example, Oscar Wilde, George
Bernard Shaw, Georges Clemenceau. But it probably
comes from James Agate in the 1920s, and he was originally talking about
Russia. But so as not to antagonise my
American friends too much, I would report that an American wit has riposted,
‘If what goes on in Europe passes for civilisation, then perhaps it is just as
well we skipped this step.’
Au revoir.
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