Druin Burch

As I write, the rain is hammering down on the flat roof of the kitchen extension I had built a couple of years ago. I had planned to be outside, putting the remainder of my spring bulbs in the ground, but I’d need the oilskins of a North Sea fisherman. Instead I’ve got a cup of hot coffee, I’ve washed the pans from last night’s roast goose, and I am sitting down to write this piece. What is life, if not a life of achievement? Much of the British media’s commentary on SpaceX has been consistently grudging, treating each explosion as disastrous incompetence, and refusing almost wholesale to be swept up in the joy of adventure Yesterday, at about 9.20 p.m., we had finished the goose, which had been ordered for last Christmas and spent almost a year in the freezer.

When I was newly qualified, hospitals were as desperate to fill sudden gaps in their rotas as they still are today. When I had a gap between posts I found it easy to pick up short-term work. Frankly, it was hard to avoid. Lacking a reputation as a positively catastrophic young doctor, I was promptly press-ganged into whatever gaps I was too slow to refuse. Despite never having worked in an emergency department, I was asked to cover the first three days of the academic year, when the new juniors had arrived but were off being trained. I didn’t know how to stitch, how to deal with fractures or sprains, how to cope with most of what came through the front door of the small English hospital where I happened to find myself. None of this proved a problem.

'The only reason they would not be fatal,' said the barrister Sara Mansoori KC, 'is because the claimant would be locked up and prevented from his desire to end his life.' She was speaking of allegations of sexual misconduct, which her client denies and which The Guardian and ITN wish to publish. The client is a celebrity identified in court proceedings only as PPT. On Tuesday, after hearing of PPT’s declared intention to kill himself should the allegations against him be published, Mr Justice Nicklin dismissed his application for an injunction. The judge made no finding about the truth of the allegations but did find that the state’s duty to protect the celebrity lay with NHS psychiatric services, not with a requirement on the courts to prevent publication.

Today the clocks change and today is St Crispin’s Day, anniversary of the battles of Agincourt and Balaclava.  Legend says Crispin and Crispinian were twins, beheaded under Diocletian. Aristocratic Romans who supported themselves in exile as shoemakers, they are the patron saints of cobblers, tanners, saddlers, and curriers. The feast fell from observance long after the professions it celebrated had ceased to be common. But Shakespeare keeps it alive. The clocks fall back and winter’s footsteps remind us of what is inevitable – and that we should eat, drink, and be merry before it arrives Perhaps we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, but that which we are, we are: we have our inherited culture still.

‘Israel has a history of appropriating Palestinian culture,’ says the website palestinepoppy.com. This is where you can purchase your Palestinian poppy badge for Remembrance Day. For only £1.78 a Palestine Peace enamel badge could have been yours via an eBay storefront that, as I write, is out of stock. People should be as free to wear a Palestine poppy as a white one or a red one or no poppy at all. But we are also free to mock and condemn those who corrupt our traditions Of that £1.78, an unspecified amount ‘covers cost of production’.

Simon Pegg has announced his diagnosis of ADHD, a condition now so well known that its abbreviation is normally left unexpanded.The BBC explains the good news. Before, Pegg had attributed certain of his qualities to ‘just character fault’. Now he sees them differently, and so does his wife. ‘She makes allowances for forgetfulness and and lack of concentration,’ says the Beeb’s article. Human variation, like human suffering, can be defined in a host of ways Perhaps Pegg repeated the word ‘and’ in that sentence because of his ADHD; perhaps the BBC editor let it stand because of theirs. Certainly, I didn’t spot the repetition the first time I read the piece, which might, for all I know, be because of mine.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes reached the summit of Everest at the age of 65. After eight years in the military, including a period with the SAS (from which he was dismissed, having plotted to blow up a temporary dam built by 20th Century Fox for the 1967 film, Doctor Dolittle), he set out on a lifetime of adventures, any one of which would have been remarkable. With Charles Burton he was the first to reach both poles by surface travel, with Mike Stroud the first to cross Antarctica unsupported on foot. In 2000, impatient with a surgeon’s advice to allow his frostbitten fingertips time to demarcate, he cut the blackened ends off himself with a fret saw (the thumb took him two days). He kept the digits in a Kodak tin.

The Hobbit was published on this day in 1937. It is a book I treasure, and not one of the world’s great books. It was 1937, an age away, when JRR Tolkien's book was first released. There are people alive who remember that year, but not many. The Hobbit was published by George Allen & Unwin after Stanley Unwin commissioned a review of the typescript (standard fee, one shilling) from his ten-year-old son, Rayner. When he reviewed The Hobbit, CS Lewis said it was a children’s book “only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery.

September is here, and the mists and mellow fruitfulness have arrived as promptly as John Keats could have wished. His medical career peaked 210 years ago. He was working as a surgical dresser at Guy’s hospital, a coveted junior post, and in July 1816 passed the examinations qualifying him as an apothecary, a role then beginning to be called by its new name of 'general practitioner'. The annual European Society of Cardiology meeting finished in Munich last weekend. A new 'superhuman' AI tool capable of spotting heart disease in less than two seconds was presented there. This is exciting, but Keats would have been sceptical – and dubious about the business of medical breakthroughs.

As a young Emergency Department doctor, I developed a spiel for the kids who came in with mental health problems. ‘I do the easy bit,’ I told them. ‘I deal with the physical. Let’s get that sorted first and then I’ll put you in touch with the people who’ll do the hard bit, the important bit, and who’ll help make life brighter for you.’ Often I told them this as I stitched up gashes they’d made in their arms or legs or chests. Frequently the gaping skin, parted to reveal glistening fat or muscle beneath, lay beside rows of older scars. Sometimes there’d be no scars save their despair, and I’d be taking blood to check on their overdose.

Only in France have I ever looked forward to attending a pharmacy. Napoleonic Paris, in response to the fatal incompetence of its citizens at foraging, mandated that pharmacies should come to their aid in identifying mushrooms. Across France they still do. I have wandered into many, clutching samples of my haul. Back in Britain I just eat them, but in France I get a second opinion. Firstly, I’m more adventurous there, knowing I have an expert safety net near at hand, and secondly the mushrooms are slightly different. There is the added appeal, though, of showing off. An indrawn breath and an impressed nod greeted one particularly fine bolete, and it tasted all the finer as a result.