Category Archives: ramblings

people, ramblings

To Be or To Change?

Here’s Zen teacher Brad Warner on becoming something you’re not, but think you want to be. This is taken from his Hardcore Zen weblog.

[T]he effort to be something you’re not always seems to go wrong no matter what it is you want to be …

People who are working on fulfilling some image they have of a “nice person” are usually a pain in the ass. Their efforts to be like the “nice person” they’ve invented in their heads almost always get in the way of actually doing what needs to be done … The kind of forced helpfulness such people engage in is almost never helpful at all. It’s annoying. Sometimes it’s even harmful.

But those of us who realize that we actually aren’t as good as we could be have a real dilemma. What do you do when you recognize that you really are greedy, envious, jealous, angry, pessimistic and so on and on and on?

To me, it seems like the recognition of such things is itself good enough. It’s not necessary to envision a better you and try to remake yourself in that image. Just notice yourself being greedy and very simply stop being greedy. Not for all time in all cases. Just in whatever instance you discover yourself being greedy. If you’re greedy on Tuesday for more ice cream, don’t envision a better you somewhere down the line who is never greedy for more ice cream. Just forgo that last scoop of ice cream right now. See how much better you feel. This kind of action, when repeated enough, becomes a new habit. Problem solved.

Which is really very much how I felt at work, and still feel, about personal development. Trying to totally restructure someone to be different (say, totally embodying that great new sales technique) doesn’t work and is actually destructive of their personality. Indeed it is tantamount to brainwashing.

I need to be told about it, sure. Then I need to notice, in my own quiet way, the bits that work for me and try using them or incorporating them in what I do. That way I build on the existing strength of my personality, rather than destroying it and starting over.

No wonder I never fitted the company mould, and management didn’t like it!

Change not only has to come from within it has to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

ramblings, science

29 February

Today, 29 February, is a unique day. So unique it happens, to a first approximation, only every four years.

But that, of course, depends upon what value unique has in your philosophy.

Scientifically today is indeed unique, in the formally correct sense. There is no other like it, for it will never occur again, at least as far as we currently understand the laws of physics which govern our universe.

Why? Because time, that ethereal quantity we measure in todays and years, is unidirectional and ever progressing. This time, this very instant, can never occur again. Hence it must be that this, and every other, today must be unique.

Enjoy your once in a lifetime experience!

amusements, ramblings

All Over the Garden

Oh God it’s going to be a day of giant rhubarb news stories.

Following on from Chancellor Osborne’s apparently sudden realisations, our beloved Metropolitan Police have issued a list of plants we should all have to deter burglars.

Yeah OK, so far.

The news report finishes with the Met’s advice that Hedges and shrubs in the front garden should be kept to a height of no more than three feet in order to avoid giving a burglar a screen behind which he can conceal himself.

Leaving aside, for a moment, the implication that female felons don’t try to hide, there’s a problem with this. The list of suggested plants includes Gunnera manicata (above; deciduous and grows to 2.5m), Golden Bamboo (grows to 3.5m) and several conifers, none of which are susceptible to being pruned or trimmed successfully to under 1 metre nor are really suitable for the average suburban garden.

Duh!

<Paging Alan Titchmarsh>

photography, ramblings

Spring Rolls

Well, we’re rolling on towards Spring anyway. And just to prove it here are some photos from our garden today.

First the snowdrops. We have only a couple of small clusters under the apple tree but they’re still looking good …

Snowdrops

Most of the early mauve crocuses are now past their best, partly I think due to last week’s breezes knocking them over. But here are a couple that are still good.

Crocuses

I especially like this one …

Crocus

And finally a feral pigeon enjoying the Spring sunshine between bouts of feeding and rutting.

Feral Pigeon

The photo doesn’t show off the wonderful iridescent pink and green shades on their necks and breasts which are really stunning when they catch the light right. Well who wouldn’t want iridescent pink breasts?

current affairs, ramblings, science

Fukushima Revisited

In yesterday’s Daily Telegraph there was a very interesting perspective on the Tōhoku earthquake disaster, almost a year on, from journalist Michael Hanlon in which he argues:

The world has forgotten the real victims of Fukushima
A natural disaster that cost the lives of thousands of people was
ignored in favour of a nuclear ‘disaster’ that never was


In the article Hanlon says, and I quote directly as I cannot say it with such conviction …

Most terrible of all, was the black wave, a tide of death which we saw apparently creeping over the landscape …

Hundreds, thousands of people were being killed before my eyes [and] like all journalists, I began writing about the disaster much as I had written about the 2004 earthquake and tsunamis which had devastated the coasts of the Indian Ocean.

But then something odd happened. When it became clear the waves had struck a nuclear power plant, Fukushima Dai-ichi … it was almost as if the great disaster we had witnessed had been erased from view. Suddenly, all the reports concentrated on the possibility of a reactor meltdown, the overheating fuel rods, and the design flaws in this ancient plant …

[A]round day three … I realised that something had gone seriously wrong with the reporting of the biggest natural disaster to hit a major industrialised nation for a century. We had forgotten the real victims, the 20,000-and-counting Japanese people killed, in favour of a nuclear scare story …

[N]ot only was the global media’s reaction to the Tohoku earthquake skewed in favour of a nuclear “disaster” that never was, but that this reporting had profound economic and even environmental implications …

[A]lthough outdated, riddled with design flaws and struck by geological forces that went way beyond the design brief, the Fukushima plant had survived remarkably intact.

There are bitter ironies in all of this … governments in Europe, including ours, were offering to fly expats home from places where the radiation levels were lower than the natural background count in Aberdeen or Cornwall.

As Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, says: “The reporting of Fukushima was guided by the Cold War reflex that matched radiation with fear and mortal danger. Reactors have been destroyed, but the radiation at Fukushima has caused no loss of life and is unlikely to do so, even in the next 50 years. The voices of science and common sense on which the future of mankind depends were drowned out and remain to be heard, even today. The result has been unnecessary suffering and great socio-economic damage.” …

[P]olicymakers should have waited until at least some science was in before cancelling programmes which, in the case of Germany, will lead to some 70 million metric tonnes annually of increased CO2 emissions, because the shortfall will almost certainly be met by coal-fired power. Nobody, to date, has died as a result of radiation leaks at Fukushima Dai-ichi. Zero — a number you will have read even less about than the 20,000 dead.

Yes, OK, I’m guilty as well. But then as a scientist I was at least concerned to try to keep the nuclear problems in perspective — as my posts over the months will testify. Nonetheless there has been a humanitarian disaster which we have all quietly forgotten. Shame on us!

food+drink, ramblings

Collop Monday

Thanks to IanVisits for reminding us yesterday that today is Collop Monday. I agree with his suggestion that it should be restored as a festivity.

For those who might have not forgotten about Collop Monday — or more likely have never heard of it — this is the day preceding Shrove Tuesday when the remaining pieces of bacon or pork from the winter store, which would be “life expired” by Easter, were traditionally eaten. It was sort of the feast preceding the feast before Lent.

As Wikipedia says “The British name Collop Monday is after the traditional dish of the day, consisting of slices of leftover meat (collops of bacon) along with eggs”.

So having been reminded of the feast what could we do but … feast! After all one never needs much of an excuse to eat bacon.

We always have a large pack of smoked bacon offcuts in the freezer. The local supermarket near where my mother used to live nearly always has these packs. They’re cheap and usually contain lots of half rashers and/or thick ends of bacon: brilliant bacon but not uniform and nice for supermarket packaging. Who cares?! They’re tremendous for just about anything you want bacon for: there are scraps for quiche or risotto or to use as lardons; rasher-ettes for bacon butties; and chunky bits you can chop up, fry for jumbo bacon butties, for breakfast or, well, just eating. So whenever we’re there we buy a couple of packs.

This evening we cracked open a pack of said bacon offcuts. It contained the usual selection. So we ate our fill of a good English fry-up of bacon, eggs, tomatoes and mushrooms; with lots of bread and butter; and a couple of beers.

What better way to celebrate an old English tradition!

current affairs, medical, ramblings, science

Curing the NHS

Recently I’ve been looking at the NHS as an outsider and a user. This has led me to think about the organisation, it’s shortcomings and whether anything really can be done to improve it.

The Health Service is something that we all want, and for which we all pay taxes. So we expect that when we need it not only will it be there, free at the point of use, but we will get the best possible treatment, speedily, in a good environment, from professional people and a professional organisation.

Sadly one or more of those elements are nearly always lacking, often conspiring to make patient care less than optimal.

Don’t get me wrong. Many parts of the health service are excellent. And in an emergency they generally work brilliantly, at least in the short-term.

Recently Noreen and I attended a Patient Participation Group which our GP practice has started. Everyone there was self-selected and had volunteered; they were not “yes men” hand-picked by the practice. And everyone there had nothing but praise for our excellent GPs, nurses and admin/reception staff — indeed we found it quite difficult to come up with anything major we thought they needed to improve. The only significant thing we homed in on for improvement was some of communicating with the body of patients as a whole. But our doctors are lucky; they have excellent staff throughout the practice and new-ish purpose-built accommodation. Nevertheless they are now short of space to do all the things they want to do.

Many parts of the Health Service are not so lucky. Visit the average NHS hospital and you’ll find a run-down building containing a large number of staff many of whom (especially at the lower levels) appear poorly paid, poorly trained, poorly managed and demotivated, giving off an air of being oppressed and disinterested. One suspects there may also be bullying by both management and unions. They seem ground down and struggling to do a good job against a background of inefficiency, waste and the awfulness of the people (mostly patients!) they have to deal with.

And that’s a two way thing. Staff (and an organisation) that don’t care about patients encourage patients to not care about how they treat the staff.

This has to lead to an attitude of unprofessionalism. As an example I am continually horrified by the awfulness of the communications I receive from all parts of the NHS. They are written in poor English (GOK what their Gujarati translations are like!); poorly typed; poorly designed; poorly printed. One recent letter I received was offset such that the right hand edge of the text was missing, it was faintly printed, poorly worded and covered in printed-on splodges of toner. It looked slapdash and unprofessional; the work of a not very careful 10-year-old. Frankly I would have been ashamed to even put it in my rubbish bin, let alone send it to anyone. And yet this was an important communication.

Go to a private hospital and you generally find exactly the opposite of all this: personable, helpful, interested, caring and motivated staff at all levels and good communication.

Why does the NHS have to be this way?

The simple answer is that it doesn’t.

Whilst bringing the whole of the NHS up to the standards of the best private hospitals may be neither achievable nor affordable, it should be possible to achieve a 500% improvement. (And this doesn’t mean US-style healthcare where one has to pay for everything or go without.) It won’t be easy; but if there’s a will I believe it could be done. In broad terms this is how I see it being done …

  • The NHS always maintains it is short of money. It isn’t; it has shedloads of money to do everything it should (and we want it to) sensibly do. But …
  • It also has too many meaningless, politically imposed, targets.
  • In consequence there are also far too many managers.
  • It probably also has too many (non-productive) admin staff. There always seem to be lots of people walking about carry pieces of paper but apparently doing little else. I’m not saying they are all unnecessary, but does anyone really know?
  • On top of this there appears to be an especially corrosive and pervasive culture; a culture of mistrust and of doing the minimum necessary; a culture which generates unprofessionalism and a couldn’t-care-less attitude.

So what can/should we do about it?

  • Well first of all there has to be a real will to do something and act sensibly, not just out of short-term political expediency or protecting one’s backside.
  • Then the budget has to be maintained at least at current levels, in real terms.

  • In doing that there has to be a vast improvement in cost control (yes, drug spend does need to be monitored, but hopefully not rationed), which means good stock control and the reduction of waste.
  • Scrap all but the most essential of targets and have what targets there are set by the clinicians for it is they who really understand what the patient needs. One target which must remain is to ensure the service is the same across the whole country; there must be no postcode lottery.
  • That should mean a reduction in the number of managers required, which will free large sums of otherwise non-productive money for patient care.
  • Then we need to look very critically at the number of non-clinical, non-managerial staff required. Reductions, where sensible, should be achievable by streamlining much of the (still largely paper-based) admin. That doesn’t mean an all-singing-all-dancing ginormous IT system; it means a large dose of analysing what really happens, what needs to happen and lots of common sense.
  • Much of all of this can be achieved by empowering all NHS staff to make the right decisions for the patients (both individually and collectively), empowering the staff to help improve their environment (why shouldn’t they repaint a wall or fix a door handle? — they’d do it at home!) and take pride in what they do.
  • All of this will only happen with a major change in culture to one which cherishes and values both the employees and the patients; a culture in which the staff treat the patients (and each other) as they would wish to be treated themselves. That has to start at the top: the top of each hospital/practice and the top of the NHS, ie. with the politicians and Civil Servants. Lip service won’t do; management have to demonstrate that they mean what they say. It also needs the staff — and the unions — to engage with, and believe in, the process and have an element of trust in it.

None of this will be easy. I’ve worked in an organisation where it has been done. It is difficult, painful and takes time. It needs a determination from everyone to make it work. Heads will have to be banged together. It almost certainly means shedding staff: if nothing else the non-believers have to be encouraged to change or move elsewhere — for their good and that of the organisation. It needs good, no-nonsense, management at the top; management with a long-term vision, a determination to make the right things happen and the charisma/skills to be able to fully engage with their staff at all levels. It also needs the unions to be willing to embrace the change (or be sidelined).

What is not needed is what we currently have: short-termism, poor management, bullying and continual change driven b
y political expediency.

Someone has to get a grip. Sadly I don’t see who that someone is.

personal, photography, ramblings

Grandma Marshall

3 Comments

This week’s theme over at The Gallery is A Family Story. As Tara says

This week I want you to dig back into your archives — be that last week, last year or the last century — and tell me a story. You know those quirky little stories you pass on from generation to generation? Every picture tells a little story, but some tell a really special one. I want to see THAT photo.

So … This is an oil painting of my father’s mother done by my mother, probably in the early 1960s. I photographed the painting a couple of years ago.

Grandma Marshall

It is a scarily accurate representation. Yes, she was as miserable as she looks; I never recall her being in the least bit fun — but that’s what strict Baptism and being left by your husband for a young floozy during WWII does for you, I guess. (Somewhere I have three illegitimate half-aunts by my grandfather.) Only now am I beginning to understand some of what happened and the ramifications — but that’s not itself the point of the story.

My grandmother died in 1973. I had no contact with her, or my father’s brother and sister, after the mid-60s (when I would have been in my mid-teens). My father more or less disowned his sister when she married her (widowed) cousin (she knew she could never have children so that wasn’t a consideration).

My grandmother’s death brought about the final rift between my father and his family. My father understood that his brother and sister were accusing him of only being after his mother’s money (there wasn’t any!) when he was asking questions merely because he was his mother’s executor. He stood down as my grandmother’s executor and a rift was created. A rift which was never healed.

I missed my aunt. She and I had always got on well and she took a keen interest in how well I was doing. To be honest I didn’t miss my grandmother or my uncle, but then I saw little of them anyway. I knew I dared not re-make contact while my father was alive as that would only make matters worse.

When my father died in 2006, at the age of 86, I figured that if they were still alive his brother and sister (both younger than my father) deserved the courtesy of knowing. I had to do some research; I knew only my aunt’s and my uncle’s approximate addresses from my teenage years. Where were they now? Were they even alive? I thought my aunt probably wasn’t — a gut feeling which turned out to be wrong; it was my uncle’s wife and their eldest son who had died.

I found addresses; I hoped they were correct. I wrote them both a short letter with a Christmas card. In it I said that I hoped they would excuse my intrusion, that I thought they should know what had happened and an invited them, if they chose, to get in touch otherwise I would remain silent. The most I expected was a return Christmas card with a polite note. But within 24 hours I had both my aunt and uncle on the phone. They were delighted to remake contact. So after a gap of well over 40 years I met up with both of them, and my cousins plus some of their children.

As a result of healing the rift I have learnt a lot more about my family, and especially the circumstances surrounding all the angst. There was, of course, far more than met my teenage eyes. I am in the process of putting together all my aunt’s and my father’s papers. I can now see why my grandmother, my grandfather, my father and his siblings were as they were/are — and some of the joins that weren’t made thus causing the rift. Luckily my aunt decided at a young age to rise above it, and did so. She became a very senior nurse and declined more than one appointment as a Matron. Despite my father I too have mostly managed to rise above the negativity although somewhat later in life.

As to the painting, Noreen and I discovered it amongst my mother’s art work when we were clearing out her bungalow after she moved into a care home a couple of years ago. (My mother is now 96 and still drawing and painting!) Knowing my aunt (the youngest child) was close to her mother, I sent her this photograph of the painting.

In June 2010 I was invited to my aunt’s 80th birthday party. Not knowing what on earth to buy her I thought she should have the painting. Luckily my mother agreed. We had it framed. You cannot imagine how delighted she was! Here she is, looking unnaturally solemn, after being presented with the painting.

Jessie with Portrait of her Mother

amusements, medical, ramblings, science

Did You Know ….

There is a brothel in Prague where the “services” are free, but live video streams of the “activity” in the brothel are shown on their website (for a fee).
[Wikipedia]

Male chimps, bears, dogs — indeed almost all mammals except humans — have a bone in their penis, called the baculum (photo is a raccoon baculum). No-one knows why it was evolved out of humans.

In the US, of those men who take paternity tests some 30% find out they are not the father of the child concerned – although of course these are cases where there is doubt to start with.
[Sheril Kirshenbaum, The Science of Kissing]