Monday morning wisdom

Bus graffiti currently on display in Teignmouth, Devon. No more words needed really….

A letter to my niece on her third birthday

Dear Libbie, I’m writing this the week after you turned three. Three whole years you’ve spent on this planet and what a three years they’ve been. I often use you as one of the reasons I started blogging, so it felt natural to write this as a letter blog post to you, so one day […]

A case of mistaken identity? A matter of life and death

My Dad died four months ago from bile duct cancer, cholangiocarcinoma. Since then I’ve seemed to blog less, and in a way that may be no bad thing, I’ve been doing lots of thinking and reflecting and recharging, but have had less concentration and less inclination to put fingers to keyboard. Then this week a […]

Life after Bobby: the first 100 days

It’s 101 days since Dad died today, I’d been thinking about this (non)-anniversary all week and was fully aware of it yesterday but couldn’t bring myself to concentrate long enough to write this post then. I’m confident Dad would appreciate the quirk of it being 101 days anyhow. So I’m going to keep this short […]

Not just a statistic – World Cancer Day

It’s 81 days since my amazing Dad died. He had been fighting bile duct cancer, cholangiocarcinoma, for five years and two months. Today is World Cancer Day and the campaign is seeking to dispel four key myths about cancer, I hope this blog helps to dispel at least two – that cancer is a disease […]

Life after Bobby: Month 2

So time moves on, it’s actually ten weeks today that Dad died but I wasn’t really in the mood to blog last week which would have been two calendar months. I can’t believe that it’s two months already, the list of things I’d have liked to share with Dad grows, my sense of his loss […]

When time is limited

When someone is told (or they decide) that their time is limited, at somewhere or something, I’ve observed an almost primal attempt to do more, fit more in, go further or faster, squeeze maximum effort into the remaining time; that or an almost instantaneous acceptance that time is limited so there’s not much point trying […]

What to buy a dying man for Christmas?

This is the first year I’ve not faced this dilemma as my amazing Dad passed away last month (you can read his eulogy here if you’re interested) but I’ve noticed that a post I wrote a couple years ago What do you buy a dying man for his birthday? has had a lot of interest […]

Getting social care evidence into practice

There have been a couple of discussions on twitter and blog posts I’ve read recently that I’ve wanted to reply to, the most clear one came from @Ermintrude2 who wrote an excellent post about her struggles to keep up with research while working in frontline practice. Ermintrude, works as a social worker in an integrated […]

The art of doing nothing

This weekend I intentionally made no plans, relishing the prospect of four whole days without a single commitment. The one exception to this is that I promised Mum and Dad that I would spend the night with them on Saturday. Dad started chemo on Wednesday and we’d been warned that this weekend would be a […]