Though it makes me suspect they’re not suitable for small children or if you have to operate heavy machinery…
The Best Imitation of Myself
All winter I see the birds, circling the tower in St. Patricks, roosting in the trees in the back garden. But it seems they lose their voice over winter and it’s only now with the first glimpse of spring that they find their vocie again.
About 10 days ago now someone pinched a couple of bags of coal from our back yard. In the middle of the night when we were sleeping.
This made me notice a few things:
1) i felt a sense of fear and violation and mistrust. Why would someone steal my coal? I started to suspect my neighbours just because they could see into my garden.
2) a move towards increasing security around the house. I got a lock and put it on the back gate, I’m a bit more cognisant about whether doors are locked. This is faulty on two levels. One – it’s closing the door after the horse has bolted and two – the way we do security makes us feel more secure but I doubt it really stops much.
3) it made me consider the idea that a peaceful society depends not on law or security but on a willingness to live peacefully (or a reluctance to steal) from one another.
Trains seem to have become extensions of the office for a lot of people. Especially the intercity to Sligo that I sometimes hitch a ride home on.
It’s one of the fancy new ones with the power points and trip switches so you can plug in your computer but not your hair straighteners.
There’s no plugs on the normal commuter trains. There’s sometimes no heat. Sometimes there’s no train. And there’s barely space to open a book never mind a lap-top.
On the fancy train it’s a different story and people come armed with lap tops with dingles, dangles and dongles hanging out of them.
So people are on their emails or on Skype or using the pinnacle of modern consumer electronics to play fullscreen minesweeper.
It does lead to some awkward moments and invasions of personal space.
People view the space up to the midline of the table as their rightful property. The back part of their lap top has every right to rest on that line. So does the person opposite.
And then comes the tilt in the screen. The tilt that’s needed to make the screen readable. Opposing screens touch. Everyone saw it, we just pretend it didn’t happen. It’s mere sabre ratlling. It’s like the bay of pigs all over again.
And in the unspoken and unwritten laws of train table ownership it’s not quite clear who has the right of tilt. I suppose it’s like those neighbors from hell who let their leylandii grow over your hedge and then you try and trim it back and it turns out you’ve no legal right and all of a sudden you’re putting out rat poison to knock off your neighbours dog and playing zeppelin at 4am to piss him off…
Something like that
Ray Moynihan writes in the BMJ on the epidemic of pre-hypertension. At it’s simplest this is best described as a pre-disease. Your blood pressure isn’t high yet but it’s on the upper level of normal.
You don’t have to look far to see whose interest such a category might serve.
Until now the definition of what constitues a condition or pre-condition, and the guidelines for treating it, have been left largely to senior members of the medical profession and their esteemed societies, often meeting in drug-company sponsored forums like the coming Vienna conference. But for people like Professor Furberg, the profession has become too close to industry. He wonders whether it may time for society at large to take more of a role in deciding who should be classified as sick.
I was back in work on Saturday for another shift and some time on-call.
It was lovely actually, which always surprises me. Good bunch of new docs and it wasn’t as crazy as it often was. I came away having made a lot less of the compromises that I normally have to make that make me hate the job.
Our esteemed leadership had put this up in the tea room:
Many of you will be aware from this blog and general knowledge that we have a target of 4 hours from when the patient arrives at the ED until they are disposed of (an appropriate term for a target that dehumanises patients that much) at either admission to a ward or discharge.
We have lots of patients who breach on a marginal basis eg they get admitted at 4hrs 2mins or something like that.
So in their wisdom and cunning the powers that be have decided that telling us the target has changed to 3 hrs 30 mins will help cut out these marginal breaches.
The target of course has not changed (for now). Surely they must know that we know that. Though perhaps the fact this poster exists at all is a testament to how stupid they must think we are.
Incidentally i think it’s a great thing that patients should wait less than 4 hours in the ED but not because of a target, simply because it’s the right thing to do. I bust my ass in work to see patients in less than 4 hours, not because of a target but because it is the right thing to do.
And yes I am a better person than you.
I always feel odd walking round Lidl, it feels like a library or something and today I noticed it – there’s no music playing in the background.
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