Livre d'Or

This post is full of UK political detail; please feel free to skip if that's totally irrelevant to you!

So I was chatting to a senior academic who works in health policy and she mentioned that about a third of the people who used to have senior roles in the now-abolished Primary Care Trusts have resigned. Some on ideological grounds because they strongly disagree with the political climate regarding health and social care, some just in disgust at having put all that work into building up the PCTs and making them function well, only to have the whole system swept away and replaced by something new. I was already pretty worried about the NHS situation, but hearing that from an insider has definitely reinforced that.

Then I went to a talk by Prof Paton, a political scientist, about the political context in which our health reforms are taking place. I shall write up some of my notes, because I think people other than me might find some of this interesting, though it's admittedly speculative, it's too soon for anyone to do a serious academic analysis of an Act that's only a few weeks old.

( Prof Paton on the Health and Social Care Act, as interpreted by me )

I am so very much not a natural Labour voter, for a large number of reasons. And I'm really angry with the party for lying to Parliament and to us about weapons of mass destruction and committing our troops to an illegal war in Iraq with massive loss of civilian life. In spite of this, I am sort of considering voting Labour because the NHS is such a huge issue for me. But Paton kind of confirmed my impression that Labour really don't have a great track record on the NHS recently (even though, yes, the NHS was a Labour policy under Attlee's government in the 40s; that was a long time ago, though!) And the promise to repeal the damaging H&SCA sounds like it's probably not worth much, though I'm not going to base my voting decisions purely on one talk by one guy, just because he happens to have an academic title. But I don't know whom I can vote for to mitigate the threat to a functioning, truly national, truly public NHS, even if I make that my sole voting issue.

kerrypolka asked for:

what you think about Anglo-Jewry and its funny internal politics, the Board of Deputies, how well all the branches get along (and don't)

I said that sounds more like a late-night booze-fuelled rant than a DW post, but she still wanted to hear my opinions, so here goes.

( personal opinions )

OK, this is over 5K words, I had better shut up and post it! I may do a separate post on how this relates to the Board of Deputies, particularly since both my parents are currently Deputies, so I might ask them for some input. As before, if you have any questions I am happy to try to answer them, if you have factual corrections that would be great because this is mostly just my personal opinions with a lot of over-simplification. kerrypolka, I hope this satisfies your desire to see me ramble!

Politically speaking, I am firmly committed to a body-positive stance. If I want to sum up a fairly complex set of ideas, I would say that means I don't think people should be judged or face discrimination based on what their body is like, whether that's on aesthetic grounds, or health grounds, or (as so often happens) a convoluted mixture where the two are confused or treated as interchangeable. I also am positive about bodies, in that I don't think it's virtuous to mortify one's body for the sake of attaining some higher spiritual or similar goal, I think people are their bodies, and bodies should be treated with respect and care. But that's not the aspect of body-positivity that I want to talk about here.

As part of being body positive, I include fat bodies. There are lots of different groups trying to improve fat people's experience of the world, using labels such as fat acceptance, fat positivity, health at every size, fat pride and so on. And they all have slightly different ideas of what it means to be an activist in favour of fat people. I broadly agree with all of these movements, but I don't subscribe in detail to every aspect of their philosophy, so I don't consider myself as a member of any of the movements supportive of fat people. For me, it's part of my general belief that people are their bodies and people are worthy of respect; there isn't a certain weight or BMI or whatever above which that principle ceases to apply.

( discusses bodies and body image, dieting and weight loss etc )

Have I alienated everybody yet?

This worked really well when I had to lead a seminar about obesity, so let's try it again. I've somehow been volunteered to run a first year session on childbearing and reproduction. It's a bit of a grab-bag of stuff, like a lot of our first year curriculum it's pretty much just introducing the students to the issues that exist. They will revisit this stuff later in the course, don't worry, we're not trying to teach them absolutely everything they need to know about childbearing in a single afternoon.

The rest of the module is about the actual mechanics of reproduction, conception, pregnancy, labour, foetal development etc. This session is about childbearing in social context. So, does anyone have anything they'd like me to convey to some future doctors about:

• Teenage pregnancy and young parenting
• Treated or untreated infertility
• Involuntary childlessness (ie unwanted childlessness caused by not finding a partner or not being in life circumstances to have children, as opposed to physiological inability to successfully sustain a pregnancy)
• Deliberately delaying childbearing for career and other economic reasons
• Social gender roles and expectations affecting childbearing decisions
• Cultural variation in all of the above

Like I said, quite a grab-bag, and to me the glaringly obvious hole in it is that there's absolutely no GSM perspective, but that's tied up with other stuff about the way the curriculum is structured (basically we don't really introduce complicated advanced concepts about gender and sexuality until the third year). Though at least there is explicit acknowledgement that this stuff is important for men, it's not purely a women's issue.

Me, I'm happily childfree, and I haven't even experienced much of the pressure to reproduce that some childfree women report. So I can't bring the same degree of personal experience I did to talking about the medical profession and fat people. But if there are any misapprehensions you would like me to address, or hurtful stereotypes and ways of talking about these issues that I should avoid, I'd be glad to hear about them! Again, I want to be very aware that these issues affect the actual students in the discussion as well as their hypothetical future patients; some of them are mature students who might have had any kind of life experience, a minority but a few of them are right now combining parenting with medical studies, and I shouldn't make assumptions that none of this stuff is relevant to the more "traditional" ie 18-year-old students straight from school.

[Sort of a response to Hel Gurney's Hair, very rough, I want to write some of this down and I don't know if I'll ever knock it into a shape I'm contented with.]

( long and messy )

If all this tangle makes me feminine, well, I suppose I shall have to live with that. There are other versions of the truth, but I won't sacrifice my long hair to be able to tell them.

Which is not a very profound title, it's just that the assigned Torah reading for last week was two sections back to back, and the sections are named after the first word (significant word, that is, otherwise half of them would be called "it came to pass" or "[God] spoke" or "the"). ( religion and homophobia )

I do welcome comments on this, but please do understand that it's fairly sensitive stuff. And if there were an easy answer I'd have found it some time in the past 20 years.

Back in 2010, I celebrated St George's day by setting up a book-recommending meme. I had a lot of fun with it, and discovered some cool new books, and expressed my fluffy-liberal-patriotism in a way that feels comfortable to me. It seems to be in the spirit of three_weeks_for_dw since people are making an effort to meet new folk, so I think I'll run it again.

The idea is that you comment and recommend me a book, and I will rec you one in return. If I don't know you you can give me some clues as to what you like, or you can let me guess based on a snap judgement from scanning your profile. I'll keep trying until I find something you haven't read and like the sound of.

For my tastes, here's 10 years of booklog, if you're really keen. I read most genres with some preference for science fiction. I want books with good characters, then plot tied about equally with interesting ideas, and I like beautiful prose but I'd rather have a book with merely functional language and interesting characters than the other way round. I don't particularly care for horror or most action / thrillers, especially not if there's graphic violence. But I'm willing to expand my horizons if you suggest something really good! In any case I'm very happy if you just suggest something that you yourself like and you think isn't well known. Oh, and as well as English I read French and can sort of manage Swedish if it's not too dense / old-fashioned.

Who's on?

So my dad's best friend from university, who has known me all my life and is pretty much an aunt to me, has a real passion for amateur theatre. This season she's directing Sophocles' Antigone, in a translation by another member of that set who is now a classics professor. I really wanted to see this production, but I have no free weekends and getting to London for a weekday evening is a bit impractical. But then it turned out that I needed to be at a one-day conference in London today, and there's no sensible way to get to London without travelling up the night before, so all of a sudden I was going to be in London during the run.

A bit at the last minute, I invited khalinche to join me, and as I'd hoped she was actually free for a spontaneous theatre visit. And it was a really cool production, I'm very glad I went. Amazingly khalinche didn't know the play or the underlying myth at all, just imagine coming to Sophocles completely fresh! I haven't studied Antigone specifically, but I do know a bit about Greek theatre in general and my head is full of every kind of interpretation from Freudian analysis to Anouilh's version. I suspect my case is more typical of the kind of people who go to see Antigone in small amateur theatres.

I found the interpretation extremely successful; the play was done pretty straight, but reasonably naturalistic, without a pedantic emphasis on Authenticity. The costumes were sort of vaguely twentieth century with a Greek flavour, rather than being set in a particular period. The translation was poetic but not forsoothly, all the lines sounded completely natural, though in a formal register which I think works better for the play than a very colloquial translation. I particularly liked what my not-aunt did with the chorus; she had just four actors, speaking most of the lines in unison but with naturalistic acting, and occasionally breaking out to give a particular line or section solo. You really got the sense that the chorus was the voice of the narrative and a human group of Theban elders at the same time. Antigone tended slightly hysterical, though to be fair most of her lines are basically about how wretched she is and everything is terrible. Adam Sutcliffe's Creon was seriously impressive, you could absolutely believe him as a tyrant. He managed just the right combination of imposing with ultimately weak, really superlative acting. I've seen considerably weaker pro productions, and I'm not just saying that because of the family connection!

It was a wonderful evening in general. I felt a bit guilty about dragging khalinche all the way out to Ealing, but it was such a glorious spring evening that walking through the suburb with a friend was pure pleasure. And my not-aunt, in spite of the usual ration of directorial panic, was able to come and sit with us and invite us for a drink in the theatre bar after the show, along with some other friends from university and some of their children as well as me. I really hope my crowd will be like that in 30 years' time, still hanging out together and talking about anything and everything. Even travelling alllll the way across London to get back to khalinche's place was a treat, because it gave us such a good opportunity for conversation.

The conference was not as good a networking opportunity as I'd hoped, partly because all the sessions overran so we didn't actually have any mingling time, and partly because I had to leave ludicrously early because the last off-peak train is before 3 pm. Also because I was a bit silly and spent the only free ten minutes I had getting into conversation with people who work for British American Tobacco (I have a family connection with them too, you see), and they are utterly useless for networking because all cancer funders forbid their scientists to have anything to do with tobacco companies. But still interesting and fun; there was a very cute talk about using a slime mould based model for predicting which compounds are going to be too disgusting-tasting to be usable. Possibly only pseudomonas and coalescent will get why I find Dictyostelium endearing, but you know.

I don't know how many times in the last 10 years I've titled posts something with the theme of my friends being awesome, but it's still true.

( social whirl )

And you know another reason why my friends are wonderful? I've not only been too busy to be online for most of the past week, but I've had technical problems with internet at home so haven't even briefly checked in. (Turns out that my router had somehow reset itself, not to factory defaults but to some other combination of settings, so nothing could find the wireless at all and I assumed the internet was out. Even after I'd figured that out troubleshooting was fiddly, but anyway, I am back online.) So while I was completely ignoring the internet, everybody went on having highly civilized discussions about contentious topics like death, disability rights and sex even without me being around to moderate, so thank you all. I will try to get back to your cogent comments over the next few days.

I made a big post talking explicitly about class and finances and the sky doesn't seem to have fallen in, so why don't I talk about death while I'm at it?

( death musings )

Tell me, is there anything that you find comforting when you have to confront death? Texts, art, music, philosophies? How do you live with knowing about mortality and the enormous unfairness of it all? Or are you reconciled to living in a world like this?