I've been going through a load of old papers on the off-chance that there might be things among them that are worth keeping. This evening I found some notes that I scribbled down while I was travelling in Eritrea in 2001

November, 2001I’m staying at the Adi Keih Hotel. The spartan rooms are lined-up on a veranda, along one side of a tatty ( Read more... )

For the sake of simplicity, and also because I really hate shopping for clothes, my choice of available footwear is limited to a pair of German hill walking boots. They last me for around three years. On a working day I will walk a minimum of nine miles in them. When they wear out I buy another pair. Oddly the soles of my last set wore away at a ( Read more... )

The work never stops arriving in Pathology. It gets to five to six in the evening, the metal shutters have been down in reception for 25 minutes and there’s still samples coming down the tubes or being shoved in large quantities through the letter box where they accumulate in a wire basket. You have to discipline yourself to turn your back on it ( Read more... )

A pod from the Accident & Emergency department rattles through the pneumatic tube system concealed behind the stained ceiling panels of the Pathology Reception.  It drops down a grey drainpipe and into a large metal box that resembles a keyboard-operated safe, mounted halfway up the back wall. There is a short pause, then the sound of a catch ( Read more... )

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In the space of about three months, two people have fallen out of windows on wards at the hospital, with predictably grim results ( Read more... )

On Saturday I attended the annual PSC sufferers meeting at the John Radcliff Hospital in Oxford. My journey there by train was drawn-out by a succession of delayed services. Such is travel by rail at the weekend ( Read more... )

It’s an unusually slow afternoon on the Pathology reception. We’ve been starved of novelty ever since the end of England Slovakia World Cup game, when one of the technicians emerged from the lab dressed in a red and white curly wig, and blew an inept victory fanfare on a vuvuzela ( Read more... )

...found in an old notebook ( Read more... )

One evening on the cusp of midsummer ( Read more... )