Marmalade does not count as a portion of fruit

Botanic Garden, Rio de Janeiro, April 2019

I suffered for 10 days with a cold I caught from a Doctor; that's the last time I help him out with a challenging patient. Not really, he's the Doctor I chose to keep when I reduced my working hours. But he could have kept his cold to himself.

Luckily illness didn't stop me from accompanying mum and dad to the last wedding I'm likely to be invited to - both nephews now done and the niece declaring she's not getting married. All involved seem to have escaped without catching anything from me. As weddings go it was a good one - a Humanist ceremony in a field out in the open, so a good thing the weather was fine. Afterwards there was a tent for food and dancing, but as the sun went down it got really cold, and obviously the main players were a generation younger than me so the music wasn't from my era. They had laid on a whole lot of attractions though - props for photographs, pick and mix sweets, a bar making burgers and bacon sandwiches, a fire pit with marshmallows to toast, the wedding cake, a mountain of cheese, more doughnuts than you can imagine and probably more that I've forgotten. It was nice. Mum and dad stayed for the ceremony and some nibbles afterwards but headed off in a taxi before the partying started.

The tax return is done! Also Eurostar booked for ski trip #2 after a whole lot of hassle with logging in and passwords. I'm not convinced the Eurostar website will ever work for me again so I've printed tickets and emailed them to myself just to be sure. Ski trip #1 is all arranged by someone else so I don't need to do anything much. Next job will be booking the bus to the resort from the train station and then it's ski hire and I'll be ready.

The planning and arrangements for all these ski trips and another visit to the Christmas Market in Munich and a week-long retreat in October have been disrupted by my changed working hours. Annual leave in the NHS is incredibly complicated: it is calculated on an hourly basis and you have to include Bank Holidays in the allowance. So if you work 10 hours on a Monday and 1 hour per day for the rest of the week, you have to book 10 hours off when a Bank Holiday falls on a Monday, but conversely if a Bank Holiday falls on a day that you don't work you can use those hours for leave on another day. Swings and roundabouts.

The hours allocated for leave are also calculated pro-rata for weekly hours worked, and the year for which leave is calculated runs from April to March. I halved my working hours at the end of July, which is only a third of the way through the year, so in the second two-thirds of the year I was given half as many leave hours compared with my allowance in the first third of the year. My problem was that I took an awful lot of my year's allowance in the first third of the year, what with the trip to Brazil and the music festivals. When the allowance was calculated for me (there was no chance of me being able to work it out for myself) in August I was presented with a remaining allowance of 1.75 hours up to the end of the year, whilst having committed to two ski holidays requiring 27 hours off. And I was fortunate that Christmas and New Year holidays are not on Monday or Tuesday this year, otherwise I would have ended up in negative balance. Luckily I've been allowed to juggle my working days and take the days off that I need by working extra days in December, January and February.

I have started to use my days off for leisure pursuits as well as all the admin and household tasks that are still needed. Last Friday I took myself off to Birmingham. One of the reasons was that I needed to exchange a defective pan at John Lewis, but then I had lunch at my favourite Cafe Soya, and afterwards I went to the Museum and Art Gallery for the first time in the nearly 20 years I've been living and working here. I didn't have time to see all that much, which leaves scope for another exciting visit, but I did see the Staffordshire Hoard, which is both more and less impressive than I was expecting. Less impressive because all the pieces on display were smaller than I expected, but more impressive due to the sheer quantity of tiny fragments that were retrieved from a ploughed field., totalling 5 kg of gold and 1.4 kg of silver. Now I have looked at the excellent website (link here) I have to say that the information provided at the exhibition itself isn't great.

Another new responsibility for me this year is to be Captain of the first mixed team for badminton club 2. The main tasks are to assemble a team for each match, collect match fees from each player, and register the score if we win. Which sounds straightforward but is usually quite a lot of hassle - I can't play in our first match, and all the men are proving remarkably unreliable so early in the season. But anyway, Mr M, I iz a Captain now, and therefore fully qualified to adjudicate on fruit portions in marmalade and other conserves.

"I love you this much"

Reps

Les Arcs, March 2019

I''m loving the new working pattern of Monday and Tuesday only, except that last Friday I went to work for a training session on the software that goes with the Flash Glucose Monitoring sensor called the Libre (which I've written about before). The training was to be delivered by one of the company reps.

We are plagued by many reps, most of them annoying and unreliable, with a couple of shining examples of how it should be done. They are very rarely allowed in at any time other than lunchtime, when they are expected to provide lunch for us, and are very much judged on the quality of the food. The rep that bought sandwiches from the hospital canteen will not be coming back; Asda and Morrisons are tolerated; Sainsburys and Tesco are welcomed; and M&S and Waitrose are very much appreciated.

Most of the time they want to discuss a new product - it could be a medicine, or a device like a glucose meter - or some research that has proved the superiority of one of their products over its competitors. The nurses show some interest because one of them is able to prescribe, although 99% of the time we have no influence over what patients are given because that is the doctor's job (and the doctors seldom have time to join us for lunch). I just eat the lunch and sometimes learn something.

A few of the reps are memorable - the one who showed us pictures of the enormous house that he and his family are building from scratch, the one who always brings wonderful Indian food like samosas and chicken tikka, the one who used to be a Dietitian before she became a rep and really knows what she's talking about. Others are terrible - one company whose products we actually want to use has not managed to retain a rep for more than a couple of months at a time since the last one left in questionable circumstances three years ago.

Another rep was in a relationship with one of the doctors, which was frankly unethical and corrupt. Since the doctor stopped working with us and they are no longer a couple her sales figures must have plummeted, but she continued to call on us without invitation and try to rearrange our shelves and cupboards to favour her products, looking increasingly unkempt, and on one occasion at an evening meeting we were fairly sure she was drunk. At one lunch she started to challenge us about why our patients are on someone else's medication rather than one of hers, and eventually she was asked to go away, and we told the company that we no longer wanted her to visit us. A pity in one respect, because she was a Waitrose shopper.

The Libre rep used to be very unreliable - late, disheveled, and lunch from Asda. Before the Libre was prescribable the company offered to set some people up on a two-week trial, so we duly contacted patients and had about twenty booked in for a group session. On the morning of the session the rep told us she couldn't come, and couldn't even offer a rescheduled date. The patients, some of whom had taken time off work and couldn't be notified of the cancellation in time, still occasionally remind us of this when they are feeling grumpy, since they don't necessarily appreciate that it was not us who cancelled.

Eventually the company was told that while we were very interested in their product, we were not going to tolerate this situation any longer and we wanted a different rep. They obliged, and for some time all has gone well. The teaching session last Friday was supposed to be delivered by the new rep, except that we were notified that morning that she was unwell, and the old rep arrived. Late. Looking like she'd been dragged through a hedge backwards. She took a few items out of the bag for our lunch (Tesco), but unaccountably took most away with her again. She didn't have the right cables to do a presentation using our projector, so we had to squint at her small laptop screen. The content wasn't what we had asked for - and then she announced that she had been assigned to us and was coming back because the new rep is being moved elsewhere.

Well. After an uncomfortable silence one of our lead DSNs told her to her face that this was not acceptable, that we had asked for a different rep and we jolly well weren't prepared to have her back, and pointed out that even on this occasion she had arrived late without all the equipment she needed. It was a tremendous and brave performance.

So with luck we won't see that rep again. But I wouldn't bet on it.

June 2018

What I've been reading

Frederica
by Georgette Heyer

narrated by Clifford Norgate

"Rich and handsome, darling of the ton, the hope of ambitious mothers and despair of his sisters, the Marquis of Alverstoke at seven-and-thirty sees no reason to put himself out for anyone. Until a distant connection, ignorant of his selfishness, applies to him for help."

A lovely easy read as usual, although this time with a little bit too much extraneous material and not enough focus on the mismatched pair who are of course destined to be married in the end even though they don't realise it.

The Gathering
by Anne Enright

narrated by Fiona Shaw

"The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother, Liam, drowned in the sea. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him."

A book often feels like a journey to me - starting full of expectation, and either rewarded or disappointed by the scenery and the experience. Sometimes there are wide vistas, or amusement parks, or snow muffling the sound of footsteps, or the smell of rain on baked grass and hot pavements. I rarely abort the journey before the end (but I admit the Origin of Species beat me). This book was a comfortable medium length motorway journey ending at Gatwick airport, with a glimpse of only a couple of interesting sights out of the window on the way. The narrator's brother has died, there's a secret which is never resolved, and then another one, and that is pretty much all there is to it. Although the writing kept me on track and the narration was excellent, it was a disappointment, as are so many modern novels - and this was a Booker Prize winner as well. I really don't know what those judges are looking for.

On the Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin

"Darwin's insistence on the immense length of the past and on the abundance of life-forms, present and extinct, dislodged man from his central position in creation and called into question the role of the Creator. He showed that new species are achieved by natural selection, and that absence of plan is an inherent part of the evolutionary process."

I had thought that I'd read this before and it was quite straightforward, but it turns out I was wrong on at least one count. It started well, but I had to give up on it in the end - he was obviously very committed to the hypothesis and supplied endless evidence and arguments to support his work, but I got tired of all the different families, species and varieties of plants and animals. I skipped to the last chapter which was titled 'Recapitulation and Conclusion' but even that was too dense. Well done to him (and Alfred Russel Wallace) for getting it right, though, and I'm going to accept the theory without managing to plough through the seminal work on the subject.

The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory
by Julia Shaw

"Memories are our most cherished possessions. We rely on them every day of our lives. They make us who we are. And yet the truth is they are far from being the accurate record of the past we like to think they are."

The main message throughout this book is that despite what we know, believe, perceive or imagine, our memory even with the strongest sensation of integrity is unlikely to be accurate. It is ridiculously easy to plant false memories even when you're not working with a researcher who is trying to do just that. However, without memory we can't create the sensation of time passing or even know who we are, so we'd better make the best of it. Just don't insist that anything happened as you remember it, because it probably didn't. I passed this book on to dad, and he's found it so fascinating that he finished it in two days but is hanging on to it because he wants to read it again. Anyone who knows dad will join me in celebrating the fact that he's both willing and able to read a book again, even if he insists on lying in bed to do it.

Under the Knife: Remarkable Stories from the History of Surgery
by Arnold van de Laar

"From the story of the desperate man from seventeenth-century Amsterdam who grimly cut a stone out of his own bladder, to Bob Marley's deadly toe, this book offers all kinds of fascinating and unforgettable insights into medicine and history via the operating theatre."

Easy to read and pretty interesting too - another one to give to dad after he's finished with the memory book. I can get through a lot of books when they're ones I've chosen from the 'science' section rather than the strange books I've picked up from various second hand sources. And when I'm sitting in a tent in a field rather than at home surrounded by all the things I ought to be doing.

The New Meditation Handbook
by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

"With 21 easily accessible, step-by-step meditations, this fully revised resource provides readers with guidance on how to transform their daily lives, fulfill spiritual potential, and find lasting happiness."

This was given to me by a friend who attends meetings in a different branch of Buddhism (Kadampa) from the one that I have become attached to (Triratna). I'm sure the alternative viewpoint is equally valid for some, and he seems to be happy with what he gets out of it, but I really didn't like the approach to meditation that is advocated in this book. It starts with an exposition about rebirth, a belief in which is luckily not insisted upon within Triratna (at least among the teachers I've encountered). Then it makes a number of other controversial assertions (what we experience in the womb, what birth feels like) and false deductions ("since it is impossible to find a beginning to our mental continuum [whatever that is], it follows that we have taken countless rebirths in the past [er, no it doesn't].) As I write this I find that I am a bit cross about the whole thing, but as the friend who gave me the book is incredibly skilled at rhetoric and argument and I am not, I shall keep quiet about how I feel and make non-committal noises if I am asked what I thought of it.