The chances of me being invited to choose eight records to pack away for the life of a castaway on an otherwise uninhabited island remain, well, negligible is to put it too positively. So I thought, okay, I’ll interview myself, if only for my own amusement. Like most ‘real’ invitees to ‘Desert Island Discs’, I… Read More »
I have just now sent off a draft of my next book, to be called ‘Health: Policy, Practice, Obstacles’. While I am awaiting comments from reviewers and the series editors, and to pass the time between writing projects – in my local, the King Willie – I thought I’d say something about a concept that… Read More »
I confess that into my 70s my stamina occasionally falters. I find myself pausing, not only unsure how to proceed with what but short of the energy required to proceed per se. This blog eschews further self-analysis in favour of a discussion of alternate ways of committing my time and limited resources. As it happens,… Read More »
There are times when it is right for people to be angry and to express warranted anger in collective action. Even as Parisians take to the streets of Paris to protest Macron’s attempts to further penalise them, the citizens of Britain remain within their home, quiescent if not emotionally or terminally acquiescent. In this unapologetically… Read More »
I have frequently commented on cafes and on the facility they offer me to write. Oddly I have had far less to say about bookshops. It is time to make good this deficit. My family will confirm that I am rarely to be seen without a book about my person, and that I’ve been known… Read More »
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX 8 July 2022 Dear Dr XXXXXXX I am writing to you in the form of constructive feedback, not criticism. I am only too aware of the harsh constraints under which GPs and their colleagues in primary care are currently working and of the wider causes of this, of… Read More »
I have on various occasions lauded the merits of what I call ‘permanent reform’, the idea being that pushing relentlessly for a mix of ‘attainable’ and ‘aspirational’ reforms might well be the optimum route to an extra-parliamentary collective mobilisation for social change of a more durable and transformatory kind. This idea is contained in my… Read More »
I have often of late been tempted – and given way to temptation in the privacy of my home – to spew hatred at the ego-fixated narcissist Johnson and his wooden ventriloquist’s dummy Starmer. It feels like a fully warranted but somehow demeaning emotion. But is it? I am reading China Mieville’s excellent A Spectre,… Read More »
In what amounts to a fairly prolific series of blogs condemning the Conservative assault on the English National health Service (NHS), I have bemoaned their clandestine advance planning, their ideological subversion, the calculated politics of austerity from 2010-2020, and the two Health and Social Care Acts of 2012 and 2022 (the first of which left… Read More »
Given time to dwell on the pros and cons of an academic career several themes occur as of significance, hence the obscure quasi-mathematical title of this autobiographical blog. Serendipity suggests events that crop up fortuitously and incur advantage; reflexivity denotes active agency; happenstance brings contingency to mind; career and cv are more straightforward. I will… Read More »