I have blogged about this before under many guises. I keep banging on about it and it's useful to give some observations again.
Recently I was lucky to have an amazing couple of weeks with a lovely clinical week at the practice followed by the ITI UK & Ireland Congress. I travelled down on the Thursday for a very good ITI Congress and some great social stuff with old friends too (we even saw a gig in London) A few days back at work was followed by a three-day trip to Liverpool, London and Bath which involved lecturing to an ITI Study Club in Liverpool, then 600 dental students at Barts in London for their National Congress and then a Mentor Development Day for The Campbell Academy Mentoring Scheme in Bath on the Friday. It all sounds very glamorous but it means a lot of time on the train. I left Liverpool on Thursday morning at 7.45am to get to London to lecture to the students and then got on a train to get to Bath and finish the day somewhere completely different.
It is the train journeys where you see the 'rat racing' at its worst. Don't get me wrong, I am very spoiled and I get to travel First Class a lot of the time when I go with work but it is just a bigger, fatter rat. I missed my train at Paddington by 20 seconds and went to the First Class Lounge which is full of middle aged, overweight chaps eating crisps, nuts and watching the news. Nobody speaks to anybody else and appeared to me to be people that do this all the time. The train left at 6.30pm which meant people got into Bath at 8pm, is this really what people do everyday? Is it really worth it?
It's at points like this that I realise just how spoiled my life is - my practice is a four minute bike ride from my house and about a nine minute walk, even then when the pressure gets on I have been known to take the car but that is frankly ridiculous. If I needed to nip out from the practice to my kids Primary School it is about four minutes away.
Also while I was in Bath I ran down the River Avon and I can assure you that it is not quite like running by the side of the Trent.
It's good to go away once in a while, it gets you out of your comfort zone and makes you do something different, particularly the speaking side of things. It makes you focus on something and learn about it but I wouldn't want to do this every week or every day of the week, there's no question it would shorten my life.
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