a deal is struck

In a very agreeable exchange this morning with my partner, we quickly settled on a sum for the sale of my surgery premises: £270,000. It is perhaps unfortunate the value of the property has only increased by £20,000 in 7 years, but I fancy the "North Atlantic Crisis" as the Chinese refer to it, has affected many people a lot more adversely than this. I could have haggled, but I (and possibly she too) felt that for the sake of ongoing harmony within the practice we should come to a mutually acceptable sum quickly.

After lunch I set out for the biggest of my several city walks. The whole area has been so afflicted by unseasonably cold air over the past week it did not seem any colder at 350 metres above sea level than it did in my own garden (a mere 30 metres above the shoreline). Possibly my silk long-johns helped...

COMMENT; I LIKE BRIAN COX NOW.

I used to be a little wary of Brian Cox, that toothy astronomer and latterly big time science populariser. Doubtless his IQ is in the 3 hundreds, but he often seemed to wear a slightly suspect smirk, the kind some convicted criminals adopt as they are escorted from the dock. But last night he thoroughly redeemed himself in my eyes. Speaking in the RTS (Royal Television Society) lecture series, his main thrust was an attack on the obsession of the media for "balance and impartiality" which can actually detract from the genuine truth of a issue. As an example he chose a clip from ITN news, where they gave the estimable Dr Ben Goldacre a tiny slot to give his views on the MMR debate (this was a couple of years back) He chose to cite an enormous study produced in Denmark where nearly half a million children who had either had, or not had, the MMR jab. There was no difference in the rates of autism or inflammatory bowel disease in the 2 groups. Yet despite this overwhelmingly conclusive evidence, ITN made sure that the piece was bookended by a "health warning" that Dr Goldacre's views were his own entirely- "a personal view" was how Alistair Stewart described them. God forbid that facts should interfere with the media's own agenda of highlighting the (entirely fictitious) dangers of the MMR vaccine.

We have seen this before: in the 1980s, the BBC adopted the same "impartial position" to ensure advocates of apartheid got as much airtime as the people opposing it. And they do the same thing now with the Palestine issue. Sometimes the media world has to wake up, smell the coffee and realise that some things are just wrong, period, and start proclaiming injustice from the rooftops, instead of engaging in the weasel-like quest for "balance"