The great Edinburgh International Festival is almost upon us again. Time to pour over those brochures and raid the piggy bank.
Being within hailing distance of everything, we natives can get a bit blasé about events that other folk travel half way round the world to attend, but this year I booked a few performances early on to make sure I didn’t backslide. As you might expect it’s the Book Festival that gets the bulk of my patronage and I’ve learned to be quick off the starting blocks for the ones I really really want. Only one disappointment: Hilary Mantel of 2010 Man-Booker fame has withdrawn. Hope she’s not ill again.
On the theatre front, no prizes for guessing why I’ve elected to go to a one-man play, An Evening with Dementia. Intriguing. It’ll be interesting to see how this ex-RSC actor combines humour with sensitivity in such a delicate area – an abiding concern of mine while writing Remember Remember.
And when it comes to lectures, I’ve plumped for a one-off: Why a scientist believes in God. I got advance warning of that one because the lecturer is actually someone I know. With that topic in my mind I just had to get stuck into The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, 
which I read between trips to hospital (ferrying and visiting, I hasten to add, not being ill myself). The author is Dr Francis Collins, a prominent American geneticist, and head of the now famous Human Genome Project, so someone who commands huge respect from a scientific point of view. From a religious angle he appealed to me too – going from agnostic through atheist to ‘a believer who stands in awe of the almost unimaginable intelligence and creative genius of God’. Wow! How come?
It’s a very clearly laid out book – lots of headings and numbered options and arguments and counter arguments. All very orderly as befits an evidence-based scientist. Nor does he shirk the less hard-nosed tricky questions and thorny issues – the harm done in the name of religion; the dangers of a God-of-the-gaps theory; the relative merits of different possibilities – young earth creationism, intelligent design, theistic evolution …
One straight read isn’t enough for my little grey cells; I’ll need to study it slowly to have any chance of assimilating his arguments properly and deciding how far I go with his reasoning. But it certainly underlined for me my own limited knowledge of science, and the truth of that proverb: ‘It is not good to have zeal without knowledge.’ [Proverbs 19:2]
After all that brain-bombardment and challenge I slunk into the garden for a little light relief. But the questions continued.
The poppies are spectacular right now. How did we get such a huge range and diversity? ‘Creative genius’ rang in my head. Could it all be slow evolution? Is it the direct hands-on work of
God? Or is it a combination? At least I know better than to talk loosely and superficially about ‘intelligent design’ now! And just wallowing in that glorious profusion of c
olour, and admiring 
the intricacy of each flower, lifted my spirits. I guess for me, none of it makes sense without God. We shall see what that lecturer says on 18 August.
Oh, before I forget, all you book bloggers out there, there’s to be another meet-up of like-minded souls on Saturday September 25th in Oxford. If you’re interested and want to be kept informed, contact simondavidthomas@yahoo.co.uk. Merely contacting him doesn’t commit you to anything.
Tags: book bloggers, Creationism, Edinburgh International Festival, Evolution, Intelligent Design, The Human Genome Project, The Language of God
Atul Gawande is a gifted surgeon and best selling author. No ordinary man, you might think. 
And yet, in his book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, he concludes that his place in the world, like everyone else’s, is inevitably small. Compared with the people who plan and execute the eradication of polio from southern India, or who operate on and invent new techniques for saving the lives of soldiers on the frontline of wars, or who revolutionise the practical care of patients with cystic fibrosis, he feels his role as a narrow specialist in a well-equipped American hospital shrinks to miniscule proportions. A replaceable white-coated cog in a huge unstoppable machine.
But he doesn’t wallow in self-pity for his bit-part in this play. No, he recommends becoming a positive deviant. You can read about his five positive suggestions for making a worthy difference in Better. They can challenge everyone, not just doctors. I was reading his book on a train at the weekend and I even applied his ideas to my attitude to fellow-travellers.
One of the five suggestions is Ask an unscripted question. That took my thoughts winging back to a TV documentary I saw on 13 July: Between Life and Death. Severely injured in a motorbike accident, 43 year old Richard Rudd is lying immobile in a hospital bed, wired and tubed, comatose and totally dependent. The family know his clear, recently-expressed wish was, in these precise circumstances, to be allowed to die. They’re ready to have the machines switched off.
But then … someone observes that Richard can move his eyes in response to a question. They check. They check again. It’s a consistent response. Evidence that he can now hear. He can understand. He can communicate. But he still can’t do anything else. Nor is there any prospect of recovery.
It falls to the professor heading the medical team to ask the unscripted question: ‘Do you want us to continue with your treatment? If you do, move your eyes to the left. If you don’t, move them to the right.’ After a few seconds of heart-stopping suspense, the eyes shift to the left. At the time I didn’t know whether to feel elated or deflated.
What does this say about the place of advanced directives or instructions to next-of-kin? I’ve documented mine. I’ve signed papers on behalf of my mother, too. Are these wishes null and void? I’ve given it a lot of thought since that programme, and the newspaper articles that followed it. And I’ve concluded that no, in my case, my documented wishes emphatically stand. If I ever get to a stage where all I can move are my eyes, that is not the real me. Please ignore any contradictory instruction I may appear to give in such a circumstance. Better still, don’t ask the question!
I’m with Richard’s mother: ‘You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t wonder if he wouldn’t have been better off dead.’ For myself, I don’t wonder. I know. I don’t fear being dead; I do fear the process of dying. There, my hand is declared. And that’s despite a sobering personal experience I had when my first child was three weeks old.
He collapsed at home and was rushed to hospital, moribund. The paediatrician said there was no possibility of his survival. But two days later he was still alive. Now the consultant said there was no possibility that he would be either mentally or physically normal. He showed me the test results; I knew he was right. I still remember earnestly praying that if this was the case my little boy would just die with dignity now. He didn’t. With or without dignity.
Back then parents weren’t consulted. Just as well really, because if I’d had my way our family would have missed out on thirty nine years of a wonderful son, brother, husband, father, who is perfectly normal in every way – oh, except that he has chosen tax as his career. You have to have a kink somewhere to do that, don’t you? But he would definitely, emphatically, indisputably not be better off dead. If I were ever in danger of acquiring an inflated sense of my own importance, this experience of my fallibility alone would reduce me to size.
But hold your horses … that doesn’t give anyone permission to override my documented instructions! I may be infinitely small in the big scheme of things but I can still make my own big decisions, thank you very much.
Tags: advance directives, Atul Gawande, Between Life and Death, Life and death decisions
Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Heard of him? Hmmm. Well, the name will elicit a groan from many a Scot who’s been forced to study his writings during their formative years.
But growing up 500 miles away I had no knowledge of either the books or the author in my youth. Shame! Shame! I hear you cry. Quite rightly. Time then to rectify this disgraceful hole in my education.
I made my first stab a couple of years ago. A good friend lent me his copy of Sunset Song, the first of the famous A Scots Quair trilogy. It took me a while to get into it, but you know me and my obsessions, I persisted – didn’t want to lose favour with the said good friend anyway – and eventually I got the hang of the language and style and enjoyed it.
This week I returned for more, but I confess it was initially in a spirit more of ‘I ought to’ rather than ‘I want to’. So it was an exhilarating feeling to find myself this time instantly into the lilting language LGG uses to evoke the ‘swing of the horses at the plough, the rhythm of the wind upon the woods, the surge of the tumbling land where the mountains run down to the sea, “the speak” of the men who toiled and loved and quarrelled …’ as his friend and critic, Ivor Brown, puts it. Absolutely! Fabulous writing. Not only amazingly poetic but also so evocative of the hard life lived between the Grampians and the North Sea in the granite towns and peaty crofts in days of old. I loved it. So I guess you could say, I finally ‘got’ what all the fuss was about!
Amongst other things LGG uses marvellously onomatopoeic words to capture bird calls, and it’s in this second book, Cloud Howe, that I found the phrase, ‘a starlings’ murmur’ meaning ‘a drowsy cheep on the edges of dawn’, which reminded me of one of my own current preoccupations. As you know, I’ve been wakened at an unseemly hour for some weeks now, by the phenomenal dawn chorus. Astonishing really, given that it’s dark for such a short time here in Scotland in the summer. You’d think the wee creatures would be too exhausted to bother to lift their heads out of their feather and down duvets.
But lying there listening … and wondering … I started to invent appropriate collective nouns for these noisy neighbours (a writer’s equivalent of counting sheep). And that led me to look up such names – authenticated ones. I’m going to share a few of the best with you:
Dissimulation of birds (small)
Building of rooks
Charm of goldfinches
Exaltation of larks
Murder of ravens
Skein of ducks (flying); raft of ducks (swimming)
Parliament of owls
Murmuration of starlings
Siege of bitterns
Ostentation of peacocks
Scold of jays
Covert of coots
Fantastic, aren’t they? But then, words are.
A friend of mine (now in her nineties) used to regularly cook drop scones (alias griddle pancakes) for our charity table at church. But sadly now the task is beyond her. Last week I visited her at home and to my astonishment, she handed me her precious griddle and her secret recipe.
I told her I devoutly hoped her magic was well embedded in the griddle because this particular culinary delight was not in my normal repertoire … well, it wasn’t then. But with a precious gift like this it feels incumbent on me to keep my side of the contract, so I’ve had a couple of stabs and been agreeably surprised by the results (although DJ says they’re definitely more anaemic than they should be). I guess it’ll take a bit of tweaking to get the balance of heat and time and consistency exactly right.
But in the process of all this beating and turning and tasting it occurred to me that authors bequeath us something of their skills and magic all the time, don’t they? Whenever we devour their goodies we can taste and analyse and mimic and learn from them even without knowing them personally; no special permission required.
I was reading a marvellous novel by Jeffery Eugenides at the time. Middlesex tells the story of Calliope Stephanides who is an hermaphrodite (intersex is the preferred term nowadays), and starts with: ‘I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.’ Brilliant hook. A curiously topical choice of reading as it turned out, given this week’s verdict on the gender tests for the South African athlete, Caster Semenya.
When I was a midwife (about a hundred years ago) I delivered babies with ambiguous genitalia and agonised with the parents. What’s the first question everyone asks? Is it a boy or a girl? Imagine having to say, We don’t know. But as far as I’m aware, I’ve never encountered anyone with both male and female organs. And I knew precious little about the condition before I read this book.
Middlesex (neat title, eh?) explores the genetics, psychology, physiology, relationships, exploitation … oh, and so much more, in a wonderfully entertaining but thought-provoking tale. It deservedly won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, in my opinion. I was gripped, but I also learned so much along the way. And Eugenides did all the slog, all the research, all the experimenting, so I can have it handed to me on a gold-rimmed platter. How generous is that?
[Photo by D'Arcy Norman from Flickr used under Creative Commons]
Tags: Caster Semenya, drop scones, gender testing, hermaphrodites, Jeffery Eugenides, Middlesex, Pulitzer prize
A fair chunk of this week could be labelled as ‘stock-taking’. The sixth novel just out … the next one finished … the eighth well on its way … where next? I blame the dawn chorus – it seems to reach an astonishing crescendo at 4am and acts as an most reliable alarm clock. Thereafter I lie in bed reflecting … and counting questionmarks … and somehow idle thoughts have a habit of turning into heavy duty contemplation.
Stats don’t help. Did you know that over 130,000 new titles were published last year in the UK alone? Hard to picture that number, isn’t it? Of course, set against calamities like the current serious repercussions from the budget, and more deaths in Afghanistan, and England’s comprehensive trouncing by the Germans, this news is small fry, but for a writer it’s a significant statistic. How is anyone going to notice my little books in that avalanche?
So it was especially gratifying to learn that 
Waterstone’s in Princes Street made a bit of a feature of Remember Remember on one of their internal displays – of their own volition, I might add; no financial incentive from the publisher. I didn’t actually see it but someone in the book business told me about it. I’m not too proud to have sneaked in specially to stand and stare, (and taken a snapshot for you,) had I known, but by the time my spies reported, the store had moved on to their next feature.
It’s a funny old career, mine. And as Andrew Rosenbeim, Editor of The Author (the official journal of The Society of Authors) says: ‘Trying to make a living by writing … requires a skill set that isn’t gifted on birth, a persistence that would deter most, and a commitment which, oddly (considering that writing is about communication) is almost impossible to convey.’
The advice generally handed out for nothing: Don’t give up the day job! Having already given mine up a few years ago, I need to periodically review progress and weigh up options. Hence this week’s naval gazing.
Oh, I nearly forgot … I learned this week (from Amanda Ross writing in The Sunday Telegraph) that some publishers and editors pay to get their books onto lists – yes, as in greasing palms with real filthy lucre. And there was I taking the statistics re bestsellers on trust! I’m sure there’s a moral lurking there somewhere.
Tags: bestseller lists, career writing, The Author, The Society of Authors, Waterstone’s
Another ten hours on trains, plus extra time on stations waiting for connections … another opportunity to read uninterrupted … what to take …?
Ahhah! One of those books that seems to permanently slip down the to-be-read pile. A (Mann) Booker Prize winner.
Sigh. Yep, I do try, but I often struggle with these big literary prize winners. Got to be in the mood (determined), with peace and quiet to really concentrate (when would that be, then?), and with a good reason to persist (a talk, an article, a bookclub session). So I deliberately created an incentive this time: my weekly blog.
I selected The Blind Assassin by Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, which won back in 2000. I picked it up in a wee shop near the hospital in Devon where my mother was earlier this year, but before I could get stuck into it, crises developed, and I spent all my time trying to sort out the muddle that is official provision for care of the vulnerable elderly.
Appropriate then that I should read it while travelling to visit her this week. (She doesn’t know me now but she seems reassured by a presence and touch, so I also read a bit while sitting holding her hand as she slept.) Cross Country trains were on my side, conveniently cranking up the air conditioning so that it was far too cold to doze off.
The Blind Assassin is off-puttingly long – 637 pages – and the detailed descriptions and slow pace would deter many a potential reader. But chapter 1 begins with: ‘Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge’ … Nothing much was left of her but charred smithereens.’ So far so good.
The narrator is 83 year old Iris Chase, who tells of her own life in retrospect, taking in major historical events of the 20th century – WW1 and WW2, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War. Interlaced with her story is a novel called The Blind Assassin, published posthumously, which makes her sister, Laura, a household name as a novelist. In between the spaces there’s an ongoing account of a 1930s clandestine affair between a married society woman and a political agitator on the run from the authorities, and a sci-fi story which the man recounts to his lover over the course of their infrequent meetings. And as if that’s not enough, the whole is punctuated by newspaper extracts outlining significant events in the lives of the Chase family. Phew! Thoroughly confused? Well, just think of the infrastructure Atwood must have needed to construct in order to keep that little lot sorted in her head and accurate on the page.
Some aspects irritated me, some were simply tedious (lots of reviews talk about the need to persist – hmm), but every now and then there’s a gem of a phrase that makes me wish for that kind of skill with language.
Picturing the dress her sister would have been wearing when she drove to her death: ‘a shirtwaist with a small rounded collar, in a sober colour – navy blue or steel grey or hospital-corridor green. Penitential colours …’
‘Getting clothes on helped. I’m not at my best without scaffolding.’
‘He gave his version of a smile – a thin crack in his face, like mud drying …’
‘Her hat was the same shade – a round swirl of green fabric, balanced on her head like a poisonous cake.’
‘The elevator was the kind that had a crisscross grille of metal bars within the cage itself; stepping into it was like going briefly to jail.’
Those moments made persistence worthwhile in my book. (Sorry, inappropriate use of idiom.) But I have to confess, overall I’m glad to consign this to the tomes that I’ve read and won’t need again. I think I’ve earned a thoroughly enjoyable tale next. Now let me see …
Wahey, Remember Remember is now officially launched – a mere three months after publication date.
Last week, as I wrote my blog, you may remember, I was cooking wee delicacies for the nibbles (the very ones pictured below), and juggling several other competing demands (humdrum domestic as well as professional ones), wondering if I’d ever be ready on time.
Anyway, on the day, the food looked passably edible. You can’t go far wrong with fresh Scottish strawberries now, can you? And a 100% silk overblouse I acquired from a wonderful lady in the Royal Highland Show a couple of years ago allowed me to pretend I had nothing better to attend to than the shape of my cuticles and the shade of my eye shadow. Did anyone guess that up to five minutes before guests started appearing I was wielding spreading knives, and sparkling wine glasses, and tangling with clingfilm, I wonder? Actually, doing the physical preparation myself this time (my own choice, I should hasten to add. Well, you know how obsessive I am) was quite therapeutic. Stopped me getting too bogged down in mental preparation – of the ‘I’d-better-read-every-report-and-academic-paper-and-legal-case-on-the-subject-just-in-case-some-omniscient-wiseguy-challenges-my-credibility’ variety.
The sun shone brilliantly, lots of lovely people came from all sorts of different professions and backgrounds and perspectives, and they mingled beautifully. Everyone was polite enough not to spit the food back at me, and they were so responsive to cue that they all sat down spontaneously after early mingling without so much as a raised voice, or a bell, or a gong in sight.
But I’m sure they’d all forgive me for awarding the gold medal for the night to the chairman, John Killick. He’s a poet who works closely with people who have dementia, encouraging communication and creativity – hence his role interviewing me about a book on the subject. You can read more about him on www.dementiapositive.co.uk although his site doesn’t do justice to his international reputation. (Nor does this photo, but somehow importing it lost something of the sharpness of the original. DJ and I laboured long and hard to rectify this, but to no avail. So sorry about that.)
Anyway, John’s a delightful man, and on this occasion he set a perfect tone for the evening with his relaxed and amusing approach, alongside a total grasp of the subject under discussion. We organised the programme much as a book festival interview, and John had dug up some impressively insightful questions for me on the story I’d written. It’s always gratifying for an author when someone has analysed and thought about the structure as well as the content of their book, and John had taken this to an extraordinary level.
One other guest deserves a special mention too. And that was Cornflower. She writes a hugely successful blog about books (recently ranking number four in Wikio’s Top UK Literature Blogs) and was kind enough to review my last one, Right to Die, last year. If you haven’t visited her site you should.
(She’s the pretty smiling one with the bag large enough to carry lots of books around.) This was my first time meeting her (and Mr Cornflower) in the flesh, but we’ve already arranged to have coffee together to have a proper chat. If you’re the author at a launch it behoves you to skim over the surface of the pond hovering superficially beside every guest, not dive deep in one spot with any one individual. Regrettably. There were lots of diving companions I hankered after on Friday night.
But hey ho, partying over, it’s now time to get back into the current book about a young widowed mother and her two little girls who’re involved in a serious road accident … and a family faced with a request for organs … and a queue of sick people on the transplant waiting list … I think I’ll soon have got sufficiently to grips with the questions and issues to be ready to sally out into the real world and spend time with transplant surgeons and coordinators and recipients and … well, who knows? It’s a big world out there! And an endlessly fascinating and challenging one. One of the guests at Friday’s launch knows someone who became a live donor and introductions are forthcoming. Oh, yes, that was another bonus – all those links and connections we made that will ripple on. Great stuff.
Tags: book launch, Cornflower, Dementia Positive, John Gillick, organ transplantation, Remember Remember, Right to Die, Wikio's Top UK Literature Blogs
In the course of moving things about to accommodate several groups of guests, I’ve become aware of a number of largish objects which are cluttering up space in our house without too much in the way of useful returns.
One is an exercise machine. It was bought at the time I started the sedentary life of a novelist – for a bargain price, I might add, as befitted my new impecunious way of life. The perils of working at a computer, at home were obvious – and steps should be taken to counter them from the outset, I reasoned. Initially I energetically increased the numbers of pushes and pulls on a regular basis … acquiring a perky sense of smug self-righteousness as I huffed and puffed and increased my cardiac output … well, until the novelty wore off, that is. Imperceptibly the hefty machine metamorphosed into a white elephant.
When a crowd of 12 visitors simultaneously descended for a week-long stay, I popped the said cumbersome object out of the way, and somehow it didn’t come out again when I reclaimed my territory. Layers of dust gathered. This week another general reshuffle associated with guests (is there a theme emerging here?) inspired me to move it back into operation. It has now graduated to a space beside my desk in the study. The plan (in my head at least) is that I hop onto it periodically to get the circulation going, and tone up the flab. Hmmm. Let’s see how long it takes before it merges into the background and becomes invisible again.
And then there’s DJ’s trombone. The offspring – for whom he’s an ongoing problem in the present department – picked up on a verbal if casual declaration of interest, and kindly treated him to one a few Christmases ago. For weeks he fiendishly practised In the Bleak Midwinter until he was technically (if not artistically) competent. He performed once in public. And since then this gleaming piece of brass elegance has remained locked in its case, still loved but remarkably uncontaminated by recycled breath.
But I’m certainly not one to judge. At the height of my earning potential I treated myself to an overlocker, an expensive luxury for which I’d yearned for decades. (In case you are one of the many who aren’t into such gadgets, it’s a form of sewing machine that over-sews the edges and seams of things to create a beautifully finished edge.) I used it to give a professional touch to the wedding dress I made for my daughter eleven years ago, and nearly gave myself a nervous breakdown grappling with all those threads and intricacies. It has since tormented me on a couple of other occasions, but over time a degree of animosity has built up between it and me to such an extent that I eventually decided to give it away. My daughter would be a much safer custodian of it than I. She is now overlocking with gay abandon, scoffing at my dismal failure to apply myself intelligently to such a ‘simple’ task. But this story has a happy ending. When I need anything finished off now, I simply hand her the garment and back it comes beautifully complete. Not a bad deal, huh?
I’m sure there’s a moral lurking in this somewhere and it relates to … use it or lose it, or something of that ilk. The same thought came back to haunt me again this week when I handmade (as opposed to machine) a batch of bread rolls using fresh yeast for the aforementioned guests. Now, I should confess that for most of my married life (40 plus years) I’ve made my own bread, but then six years ago I sank to buying a breadmaker – just for a change … occasionally. That was the thinking but then the results were so good that imperceptibly it took over; I became more and more lazy. Something about having a dog and barking yourself springs to mind. But ahah! Visitors staying this week? Yes, of course they’d love freshly made, REAL bread for breakfast, wouldn’t they? The recipe was indelibly etched on my brain; indeed I’d never bothered to write it down since it was in constant use. The dough rose beautifully … the shaped rolls browned perfectly … tasting time arrived … alack and alas, the finished product looked wonderful, but it was sadly under-salted. Pride forced me to make a second batch. An unheard-of occurrence. Yes, you’ve twigged. Failure to keep the skill alive meant I nearly lost it.
I guess I’d better keep scribbling …!
Oh, just so you’re in the picture, the launch of Remember Remember is finally happening on Friday 11th – the day after this post goes out – so more of that next time. I’m busy baking titbits for it in between thinking about what I might say. Do I smell burning …?
Tags: breadmakers, Remember Remember, sewing machines, trombones
Wahey! I’ve just had a brand new experience. I’ve been up in Dundee at the teaching hospital, presenting prizes to medical students who participated in a creative writing competition. Me … awarding prizes! How grown-up is that?!
Actually it was a particular pleasure, because the subject for the competition was ‘Ethics and Humanistic Values’- a topic very dear to my heart. For several reasons …
1. When I was much the same age as these prize-winners, I entered a writing competition organised by the BMA.
My entry was initially handwritten with a Parker fountain pen, I recall (yes, this very one with my name engraved on its side), then typed laboriously on a borrowed manual typewriter. (This was, of course, years before Wozniak dreamed up the idea of personal computers. How ageing is that?) And my essay was all about the importance of putting humanity into caring. You can almost hear the swift collective intake of scandalised medical breath in the sacred portals of BMA House. Holistic care? Tut tut. But astonishingly my entry won a prize! And I’ve been banging the same drum ever since. It’s those extra touches of kindness, sensitivity and compassion that really do make the difference. And the older I get, the more I believe it.
2. I’ve recently seen the less-than-optimal side of hospital care, as you know, but standing there in Dundee, surveying today’s young doctors-to-be, I felt tremendously reassured.
It’s heartwarming to know that they’re being actively encouraged to care, and think of patients’ feelings and anxieties; to be creative as well as scientific; not just to cram their heads with knowledge. I hope these lovely, sensitised men and women are the ones who care for me in my hour of need.
3. And then there’s my current personal crusade. I gave up clinical practice to do research about the dilemmas of modern medicine and how they affect patients and families; then I gave up research to write novels set in the world of medical ethics. And the whole raison d’être for weaving fictitious stories is to help people get inside the skin of characters grappling with these big questions. To help them understand themselves as well as others. To be sympathetic to different perspectives, beliefs and opinions. So it’s brilliant to find other people promoting the same messages, targeting the same goals.
I gladly agreed to shake a few hands and string together a few comments. And my blog gives me a chance to add my personal commendation: well done, Dundee medical school, for your healthy emphasis on reflective practice.
But I have to confess, it was sobering to think that, when I wrote my own essay on this subject, not only were none of these students so much as a twinkle in the eye, their parents were schoolkids! What’s more, the hospital/medical school in Dundee wasn’t even built. And it has been admitting patients since 1974.
Hey ho! Some reflections are more reassuring than others.
Tags: compassionate care, creative writing, Dundee, humanistic values
I do a fair amount of travelling by train nowadays, and it’s safe to say Birmingham New Street station is one of my least favourite haunts. Not only is it fearfully busy, but platforms aren’t revealed until close to leaving time, and literally-last-minute alterations occur with alarming frequency. Me, I like to be ready and waiting in plenty of time. Mad dashes from 8a to 9b with leaden cases through seething crowds of single-minded commuters do nothing for my health.
In all the years that I travelled regularly to the Westcountry, I went to great lengths to avoid changing in Birmingham, but these days I can’t avoid it, because my mother is now being cared for out in one of its leafy suburbs. Anyway, I was down there again this week, during the heatwave. Quietly melting on Moor Street station waiting for a connection, I noticed, across the track on the far platform, not one but eight massive posters – all identical. All advertising Kathy Reich’s latest book, 206 Bones.
A SHALLOW GRAVE; AN UNKNOWN VICTIM ran the heading. EIGHT times! Lots and lots of spooky black and white. All very tempting. And eloquent.
I was just comparing her marketing strategy … her sales figures … her royalties … with mine, in a fairly green-eyed, if-only, tone of thought, when my eye caught another message on a stand-alone poster:
‘Everyone that is proud in heart is an abomination to the LORD.’
Brought me up with a jolt I can tell you. Back to being Ms Unknown Writer; and humble with it.
Sigh. I guess I’ll never know what world-wide acclaim would do to my character. But I can always blame my marketing team – or lack of!
Since that eureka moment, I’ve been admiring the huge range of gardens and exhibits at the Chelsea Flower Show, and I’ve taken heart again. We can’t all be gold medallists. Very few of us will reach ‘Best in Show’. But there’s room in this world for us all.
Tags: Chelsea Flower Show, humility, Kathy Reichs