In the perfect middle-class family where the husband is fit and muscular, with a perfect six pack and a great job and a lush’s head of hair, you know the one who devastatingly loves his wife all the time?
The wife is picture-book perfect and the children are wonderful, intelligent, good looking and well behaved and brilliant at almost every sport. It’s easy for the rest of us to get depressed and upset.
But in reality, what happens is that when their children go to school on the first day everything is perfect and it’s still quite good for the next few days and then the following Monday the children say “what, I have to go to school again?”.
All of us have to get up for work at the start of January when it’s dark wondering how we’re going to make it through another year and the same sort of thing is true when you write a blog every day.
Of late for one reason or another I’ve had some wonderful and lovely messages as a result of the blog, someone even recently suggested it was inspirational (which is truly humbling and wonderful) but in the true spirit of being transparent and open, it’s probably worth explaining how it works (yet again) because new people come and go and unsubscribe and although I’ve written about this over the years, I think it frames a lot of the work that we do here and the effort that it takes.
The blog started more years ago than I care to remember but we must be heading towards 10 years.
Marie (who is now my PA but has held many positions in the practice and organisation) was the first editor and then Hayley Fox and now and for the past few years Millie Somerfield.
These guys have been extraordinary at getting the blog out every day because it’s basically dictated by me onto an Olympus dictation machine so, it reads like I speak but with that and the Scottish accent comes some difficulty in typing.
People have difficulty understanding me at the best of times but through a Dictaphone and sometimes with complicated wordings and phrases and intonations, it gets a bit harder.
And so, in truth it’s easy to produce the blog because you just speak into a Dictaphone 7 times and there’s a week’s worth of blogs and Millie will type it and make it look magnificent and beautiful and put it out there.
In order to be able to speak and say things, you need to have things to say and so whilst it’s extremely difficult for Millie to understand what I say, sometimes it’s really difficult to find what to say.
And so, then I could just miss one or two until I had something to say but then I wouldn’t do it anymore.
And so, in the same way we say to our children “yes darling, you do have to go to school today” and we find a way to enjoy it and like it and be inspired by it as best we can, such as the way of doing things that we think are worthwhile.
Kath Hare (Doctor Kath) who is our research coordinator popped into the office yesterday to ask me about a lecture that we’re involved in virtually in May about research in practice.
The lesson for research in practice is the same.
Blog Post Number - 3068
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