As I write, my cats and a visitor from the next street are hammering into their food, at nearly £5 a box. Once they only ate greens to make themselves vomit, but now they relish food labelled, ‘garden fresh’, containing carrots, pumpkin and pulses, plus ‘prebiotics to aid digestion’. I watch them eat and wonder
In Dumas’ great novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantès was condemned to life imprisonment in the notorious Chateau d’If, a lonely tower off the French coast, plus an annual flogging. The human mind being what it is he couldn’t sit peacefully enjoying his sea view. Instead his anxious thoughts continually anticipated the pain
Today is Storm Doris’s day. A woman called Helen Chivers, not Shivers as she should be, from the Met Office was on Radio 4 this morning telling us that giving human names to gusts of wind is a really good thing because it makes everyone aware of the dangers of bad weather. We must keep our
An old acquaintance died recently. A friend of mine, who was closer to him than I was, rang to tell me. She’d known him for 40 years and looked after him at various times when he fell ill. He was diagnosed with cancer three weeks ago and died suddenly in hospital last week. She tried
One of the great moments of my student life was opening the door and seeing visitors step back, shocked. I’d shaved my hair off to an eighth of an inch. It felt like velvet but looked spiky and hard. It was all down to Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder with Andreas Baader of the Red Army Faction,
I was riveted to read about Ione Wells, an Oxford student, aged 20, who was savagely attacked on a London street. She then wrote about the experience for her university paper and has now hit the national news, prompting other students to write about their experiences too. Ione has kick-started her career as a journalist,
One of my earliest memories is seeing my father in the early morning raking out the ashes of our coal fire. I was interested in the blue veins around his ankles and bare white heels as he strained forwards with his short shovel. After the ashes he carefully placed balls of newspaper, which he called
It used to be sewing mail bags, picking oakum and working the treadmill, now the government has come up with a wheeze to get convicts busy with sandbags, fence posts and kit for the armed forces. The Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, says the ten-year deal will teach convicts ‘the value of a hard day’s work’.
I am leaving London soon, coming to the end of my time as a voluntary hospital visitor working from a chaplaincy in a London teaching hospital. I have been roaming around a variety of wards for the last three years, only one day a week, but in those few hours I have seen quite a
I am leaving London soon, coming to the end of my time as a voluntary hospital visitor working from a chaplaincy in a London teaching hospital. I have been roaming around a variety of wards for the last three years, only one day a week, but in those few hours I have seen quite a
I feel like Job. Everything of significance is being stripped from me. In August my flat in west London was badly flooded; on 25 September I lost my job; on Monday lunch-time, 25 October, my beloved cat Stan, apparently terrified at the sight and sound of me knocking in a fence post, took off and
Not so long ago disaffected youngsters would take to a life of crime and hard drugs, a trajectory which would often kill them. These days, some young men from our Muslim community sign up instead to the so-called Islamic State, and the dream of a distant Caliphate. Why? Well, forget theology or even the prestige
Sometimes I have a quiet time as a voluntary hospital visitor. But recently I’ve witnessed a lot of distress from people of all ages and types. The other week I saw an elderly Middle Eastern man bent over a bin in a ward corridor, crying almost uncontrollably. I asked him the problem and he stuttered
Sometimes I have a quiet time as a voluntary hospital visitor. But recently I’ve witnessed a lot of distress from people of all ages and types. The other week I saw an elderly Middle Eastern man bent over a bin in a ward corridor, crying almost uncontrollably. I asked him the problem and he stuttered
My aim as a hospital visitor is to cheer, befriend, have a chat, do something to disrupt the bleak monotony of the modern hospital day. Some patients talk amiably while others are grumpy, demented patients kept on wards for months and who won’t shut up. Many conversations lead nowhere. Some days the pillow talk is
I recently decided to move house. It started with a resentful yearning to own two bedrooms, but I quickly discovered that to afford a spare room, I must leave my seedy area of west London for a worse one, or leave London altogether. Not easy after 30 years. Since I made up my mind to
One of the patients I see regularly as a voluntary hospital visitor, who has been in hospital for weeks, seems to be getting better. Still skeletally thin, he is now sitting up and complaining. His problem is that he longs for a jacket potato with just butter. He hates beans. But he might as well
Let’s not pretend that it’s just those hospital trusts investigated, or put on ‘special measures’ by Jeremy Hunt that are the problem. On my weekly trot around the wards of a big London teaching hospital, everything seems fine, the patients reasonably clean and well cared for. But over the months I’ve noticed that, even here,
I decided to become a hospital visitor last year, after being a patient and finding myself in something more like a factory than an old-fashioned ward. A terror of infection in 2011 (there were 2,053 deaths involving Clostridium difficile) has ended the cosy world of side tables covered in flowers and cards. Concerns about data
