Walking The Dog

You know that lazy afternoon feeling - sitting on a hillside/beach/boat/at a table on the pavement outside a cafe/bar - mug/glass of something hot/chilled in your hand - clouds slowly sliding across a blue sky - a gentle zephyr of a breeze dancing through your hair - and nothing to do but sit and stare? That feeling when your thoughts succumb to day-dreams and your eyes close and real dreams start to unroll inside your head.  Has anyone else noticed that social isolation has a similar effect - all-be-it one laden with anxiety and punctuated - like big fat rain drops tumbling out of the sky - with frustration? The lazy afternoon bliss of holiday freedom replaced by the lazy afternoon en-trappment of a global pandemic, but both tipping us into our dreams. So, this becomes another day for dreaming. Like yesterday. And the day before. And then for dreaming about dreaming. And perhaps for asking, 'What is a dream?' Dream - definition:  noun  - a fantasy of the im...

I have posted an i-phone photograph of the sunrise, on Instagram, every morning, for the past 22 days. And I am exhausted. But not so exhausted that I am tempted to stop. Not yet. Small things give purpose to the day. Particularly, when day after day we are in lockdown and the world looks more different than we could ever have imagined. There is something anchoring in seeing the sunrise. Maybe, it harks back to a deeply-rooted instinct that looks to the sun for reassurance. Maybe, it is my way of finding a constant - if the sun rises then I can too. I can begin my day. The coronavirus has altered the world we live in, but the earth hasn't changed. Or has it? Arguably, the earth has changed - Across the industrialised world, industry has shut down and commuting to work has all but ceased. As a result, pollution levels have collapsed. The WHO estimates that the smog caused by air pollution kills over 1.5 million people a year in India. Now the air is so clear that the H...

There's a first time for everything. Some firsts are met with deserved celebration. Some with derision. Some with despair. Some with a 'Huh,' and a shrug and a 'well, there you go - it was bound to happen.' That my laptop didn't try to correct  covid-19  in the title above, or just now for that matter, is one of those shrugging, almost sighing but actually can't be bothered to expend the energy that a sigh would require firsts. It was inevitable. Say something or type something enough times and it becomes the norm. Which is an intriguing thought - maybe we could invent a word and see how long it takes to get picked up by others. But hang on a minute this happens already. Lexicographers such as those working for the OED make their living out of tracking the evolution of language - the appearance of new words and the loss of old ones. As the coronavirus pandemic marched across a stricken world, covid-related words splurged all over our inboxes; social media...

How to switch off. Switching off is hard at the best of times, but as this is the furthest from the best of times that any of us has ever experienced, right now switching off is well nigh impossible. Or is it just me? Despite Life in a time of covid-19 - parts 1 to 4 and my advice to find our happy place; practise the ten daily gratitudes; and to be kind to ourselves, I find that I am not very good at practising what I preach. My mind jumps from one thought to another and my actions start and stop in a desperate attempt to keep up with my thoughts. Maybe meditation ... or regular exercise ... or a good book ... or gardening ... or a walk with the dogs ... or baking ... or sorting through the freezers ... I'm doing it again: sprinting towards a finish line along a track filled with distracting potholes and all the time having to find different ways of not falling in. Or if these ways are unsuccessful, of actually falling in - I walk into a room and find I don't know why I...

Do you remember that tight feeling in your hand at the end of exams - the clawed, feels-like-I-dipped-them-in-cement-three-hours-ago stiffness of fingers clamped round a pen; the numb divots in finger pads, and the heavy, whole arm and shoulder ache? I remembered it yesterday. First we had loo-roll shortages, swiftly followed by a complete disappearance of pasta and paracetamol and dog food and nappies, now there are shortages of medicines. But before you panic ... yes, there's a shortage of some things, but most common medicines are available in many different brands or there are 'similar enough' medications to make logical swaps. Though by the end of yesterday, logic was beginning to give way to desperation as our pharmacists started calling patients to check if they had really run out or could wait a couple of weeks. We live in very strange times. These shortages are a small and probably temporary part of that strangeness and will be lost as the bigger picture comes in...

First - no I didn't: have to don PPE at work yesterday (... see the Life in a time of covid-19 - part 2 blog if you're confused). This was a huge relief. But I have vastly more than huge respect for all those who did. As GPs ... I've never admitted to being one here before but hey ho times change ... we are usually on the frontline but right now the frontline has washed into the A&E departments and we are left with phone calls; lots of them. We're doing what is called telephone triage which basically involves speaking to many worried well; issuing too many prescriptions for antibiotics to sore throats and earaches; and trying to diagnose rashes from descriptions of how red or sticky they are. Video calls are coming but what looked like plain sailing last week has veered off into choppy waters with messages not sending properly or sending twice or the process freezing on screen almost like its afraid of something; maybe its moment of being the rabbit in the headl...

'The way I mean to go on' ... what does that mean? At New Year, we ask ourselves and each other, 'What are our resolutions?' I have written about this before. Hundreds of people have written about this before; every minute of every hour of every January 1st ever since someone first had the bright idea that on the strike of midnight when December 31st trips over into January, it would be a bright idea to recalibrate; to promise ourselves that we would change. And we all know what happens to most promises. They get broken; most of them before the end of January. No, strike that out and let's be honest, most are broken by the end of the second week of January; sunk with everyone else's broken promises into the murky gloom of dying resolutions and dark mid-winter. So for a moment, let's break this ramble down, reiterate a bit, and return to where I started - resolutions are pointless promises made out of desperation when we look at the lives we have created...

Lord Byron - that maverick, troubled thinker and poet - said If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad I haven't written for a while. Perhaps I have gone mad. Indeed, perhaps I have ... Perhaps the whimsy that is the word jumble in my head resides in Aristophanes's  cloud-cuckoo land . Either there, or perhaps it has flown  away with the  Celtic  fairies  of my youth. Don't you just love a good idiom? Idiom  -  derivation : probably from the Greek idioma meaning private or peculiar phraseology (ref. Oxford Dictionaries online);  definition : a group of words that when presented in a particular order take on a meaning that is not obvious from the meanings of the individual words eg. over the moon, on the ball, piece of cake, hit the sack, let the cat out of the bag, and method in my madness ... which there is. But mine is innocent; not the murderous  method  of Hamlet's  madness . And if you'll give me the benefit of...