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Dateline 20 May 2017: Imagine being so sick that you need home visits by nurses. Imagine having a friend who one day takes you out to lunch where one of your carers happens to see you. Imagine being told that since you have a friend who can drive you to lunch, you no longer need home visits. Is this nationalised health care?

Dateline 28 April 2017: I spent some time discussing age-related change with people now planning for such change. One feature of today’s discussion was that planning has become reactive. There had been time for planning but the act of planning was perceived as premature, defeatist, greedy, divisive, manipulative, demeaning or a mix of those and other excuses I can’t recall. So the planning was left to “others”. And the recommendations of those “others” were ignored because gerontology professionals advised that self-determination prevails. This version of historical and present reality is both true and sad. And because of it, the future of the individuals concerned is less predictable than it should have been. There will be revisions in the retelling of this story, much like corrections to blog posts, and there will be others to blame. Always others. Thanks be for the blames of “others”.

I blogged these two items three years ago during fund raising and training for The Yorkshire Three Peaks charity walk. And here are two more excerpts. The first reposted because I’d forgotten I’d blogged about Hanley and Stendhal once before and was pleased to see my recent retelling of the Scarlet and Black anecdote was reasonably consistent. The second because it’s a timeless quote that will survive the many that suddenly have less time.

Dateline 30 April 2017: I was remembering how lucky I was to have had the writer Gerry Hanley as a family friend. We had many conversations, literary and otherwise, especially during the occasional times I drove him home after dinner chez nous. One such night, he asked me to argue the case for my favourite book. I might have answered The Lord of the Rings. I could also have comfortably argued for Principles of Physical Geology, a book that changed the direction of my life. And at that time, The Great Gatsby had also been a big influence on me. Yet I know that I replied Scarlet and Black by Stendahl. I had only recently read it and I identified more with the ‘coming of age’ theme of the young Sorel than I recognised in any of the somewhat seedy Gatsby set including Carraway. Today, I might give a completely different answer. But back then, Scarlet and Black had deeply impressed me. Gerry told me that it had been banned in some countries for being subversive, which made it all the more interesting to me, living as I did, in a repressed, religion tormented third world country of banned opinions amidst the fear of terrorism. I was reminded of this conversation when I read about a condition called Stendahl Syndrome (and another link is that Gerry died in Dun Laoghaire 25 years ago). Anyway, back to the syndrome, said to be common in Florence, as I understand from wikipedia (and I don’t want to be responsible for sending you down that rabbit hole).

Dateline 1 May 2017: Thought for the day from Bertrand Russell perhaps: “War does not determine who is right – only who is left”.

And just in case, here’s Walking Commentary 2017.