Blog 29th March – 5th April 2015
I started my week at a one day conference on Modern Digital Methods in Epidemiology
at SOAS organised by The Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Health. This is not a topic I know much about but because there was a brilliant paper on Ebola by Dr Nick Golding, from Oxford University I thought it were the full day (and he was on at 1620!) I wasn’t disappointed I just cannot make out too much from the notes I took. I did send a note to Tarek Elabbady at Microsoft in Seattle to ask him how our attempt to find $50m for an African Health Institute was progressing. In the evening I attended a Sounding Board at the Design Council in Islington. I didn’t feel we had made much progress over the past year.
On Tuesday, I had a conference call with Dr John Stedman, CEO, of NIS SE which I chair. We have spent the last three months re-structuring and come early May we will be ready to support which ever government is elected. In the early evening, I met Mono Ghose, a film director, and we talked about how we might make a documentary on Concussion in Sport. Ridley Scott has a major film out on the subject in November.
April Fool’s Day brought its usual array of jokes including a letter signed by business chiefs in the Daily Torygraph but written by Tory HQ. The BBC ran the story all day without checking how many were non doms or paid no tax in the UK. How can the News department of the BBC with more journos per sq cms than any other news desk in the world not check this out first? They have lost the plot.
More amusingly, The Guardian led with Jeremy Clarkson having seen the light and wanting to become president of some new rainbow alliance of green global bodies. Not quite as good as the one about Mandelson becoming the new DG of BBC fifteen years ago. I loved the Indy joke about Leicester being renamed the City of Richard 3rd. I had a surprise but welcomed call from the El Pais journo, John Carlin who wrote amongst many things Playing the Enemy: and the game that made a Nation which was made into the film Invictus. He wrote Nadal’s autobiography in 2011 and more recently penned a book about the Oscar Pistorius trial in South Africa. We had a chat about European politics.
Joyce, my sister, who lives in Cedar, near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island (my mother was Canadian) celebrated her 62nd birthday on 2nd April and we had a long chat. She had a new knee last year and has the other one to do sometime this year. Five years she recovered from breast cancer. She’s been in the wars (I try and see her every other year) but she’s a toughie and will come through. As it happened I had seen my consultant as well earlier in the day. I had a minor operation last year at UCH which went terribly wrong and I had to have two more. I am now 95% okay. For good measure he had done a batch of other tests – diabetes, prostate, liver, kidneys et al – and I cam through with flying colours. They say about men in their sixties that they need to reach seventy more or less intact! At lunch time I popped into the RSA to hear Zac Goldsmith who is limbo (he was/is the MP for Richmond) speak about his Recall Bill which his party would not support. The hall was packed. I said that MPs should serve only two terms.
For Good Friday, we all went to that other church, the gym to work off our excess – at least that was our excuse. We saw Suite Francais in King’s Road in the early evening but it was patchy at best: essentially a good idea but a poor script. In the evening we tried The Pantechnicon in Motcomb Street which was friendly and compared to Thomas Cubitt and The Orange decidedly quieter (they’re the other two owned by the same group).
On Easter Saturday, Sergei came to put up a trellis or two in what counts for our back garden. It rained so he could not finish the work. We went to the matinee of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown a musical starring Tamsin Greig who was sensational but I thought the story weak and a tad insipid.
On Easter Sunday, we went to Westminster Abbey which was packed. Afterwards we toasted absent family friends at The Conran before going onto Hix @ Brown’s for lunch. In the evening, I spoke to Jack who was having a few days in The Keys rather than going up to Indianapolis to the basketball final between Duke and Wisconsin. He’d gone to the play offs on Friday but I thought as he only had one year at Duke not to go to the final to see your team win might be something he would regret but hey.