MH Photos

Castle Howard is a stunning 18th Century stately home in Yorkshire. The east wing is still lived in by the Howard family. It was the setting for Brideshead Revisited. The small building is the Temple of the Four Winds, one of the Victorian follies on the grounds. An enchanting afternoon.

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I'm posting some of the photos that I took of the junior doctors' march that took place in London today. We walked from the Royal College of Physicians near Regent's Park to the Royal College of Surgeons next to Lincoln's Inn Fields. The official estimate was that there were 12,000 people marching. I don't think that it was quite that large but there were at least 3,000 doctors, their families and friends, in attendance.

If anyone would like a higher resolution copy of any of these photos then please email me.

I'm sad to report that Jean Baudrillard, the French cultural theorist and intellectual died on March 6th in Paris.

I don't think that I can write anything that will give enough credit to his contribution to post-modernism and post-structuralism (check the Wiki entry). Baudrillard commented on many topics but is best remembered for his notions of hyperreality and simulation. He sought to understand the world by the analysis of the power of objects to seduce and simulate reality.

"Some know how to slip away at the appropriate moment. Their death is a stroke of cleverness: it makes the world more enigmatic, more difficult to understand that it was when they were alive, which is the true task of thought."

Here's a link to the statement to the House of Commons made by the Health Minister, Patricia Hewitt.

Also, here's a link to a point of order raised in the House by Tory MP Andrew Murrison.

With the first round of interviews just about over, the government is finally waking up to the fact that they have made a huge mess of this unnecessary change to medical training. I fear that it has all been left too late to do anything about. The only option left is to take industrial action.

There's a great deal of uproar in the British medical community at the moment. The government and NHS have introduced a new system for doctors that wish to apply for specialist training.

All current specialist trainees have had to reapply for their own jobs, even those who are well advanced in their training and have been at their posts for a number of years. The application process has been web-based and there have been loads of cock-ups. The problem is that only 20% of the doctors in my hospital have been offered an interview for any job. Some have been been invited to interviews for jobs that they didn't apply for or are not qualified for. One of my psychiatrically minded friends was offered a interview for a paediatric position.

Unfortunately, the British Medical Association is as useless as the Australian Medical Association when it comes to negotiating on behalf of junior doctors. They have made no effort to ensure that this process has gone smoothly or even to give advice or support to their members.

Many of my friends are very worried about their futures. Some of them are people with families who are facing the prospect of not getting an offer for a London job and will have to relocate to wherever in the UK they are sent.

For more information on what's going on, check out this excerpt from Channel 4 News (7/3/7). Click on "Watch the Report" to see what went out on the air.

There is one group that is taking a stand against these changes. Check out Remedy UK's website here.

It's not the sort of story I would normally comment on but I couldn't ignore this moment in Britney Spears self-destruction.

Some of you may have heard that Britney recently shaved her hair down to the scalp. She left the hair on the floor in the California salon and it is now being offered for sale on Ebay. Apparently, the current going price is US$1million.

Who knows why Britney chose to do this odd thing? The tabloids have been saying that she's been living a party lifestyle over the past months. Could she have experienced some sort of breakdown? The answer could be extracted from her hair.

Hair is made up of the remnants of dead skin cell proteins that have been pressed together. It contains a record of the proteins that have been excreted by the skin over the passage of time. This record is only as long as the age of your haircut. It's possible to get an indication of a person's biochemisty and measure particular chemicals that have been through their blood stream by analysing the substance of the hair.

Whoever ends up owning Britney's hair would be able to see exactly what Britney's body was excreting in the time leading up to her follicular transformation. If she did happen to indulge in any illegal pharmaceuticals over that time then the hair would be able to tell us. But I am sure that there would be no evidence of any such thing.