february book and film review

As promised, here follows my book and film review for February.

MURDER MUST ADVERTISE, by Dorothy L Sayers. An immaculate little book featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, who goes under cover in an advertising agency to expose a murderer. The part where he becomes so fascinated by his work as a copywriter that it threatens to impede his criminal investigation is priceless.
GIBBON'S DECLINE AND FALL, illustrated and abridged edition. I read the unexpurgated version in 2008 and pronounced it one of the great books in the English language. I was looking forward to looking at this lavishly illustrated edition, but was dismayed to discover it only actually covered the fall of the Western Empire, leaving out the glories of the Byzantines and even more amazingly the Crusades, which formed one of the most exciting parts of the original. Very disappointing.
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. To be fair, I haven't quite finished this yet; I have about 150 pages to go (out of 900) so I still don't know who dunnit. What I do know is that this is one of the great novels of the 19th century and speaks eloquently to us here in the 21st. Strongly recommended.

FILMS

THE ORPHANAGE, 2007 (D-Guillermo del Toro). Del Toro set himself a very high bar with Pan's Labyrinth, perhaps the best film of 2007. Pity, then,that this doesn't attain that lofty standard.
TRANSFORMERS, 2007 (D-Michael Bay) Strangely enjoyable hocum, in spite of its ludicrous concept; Michael Bay I would suggest does this sort of thing as well as it can be done.
IRON MAN,2008 (D-Jon Favraeau) Again, I probably shouldn't have enjoyed this, but Robert Downey Jnr's performance kept me watching. Whatever else you can say about him, he's certainly got a great screen presence.
FANTASTIC FOUR, 2005 (D-Peter Story) OK, I haven't exactly reached for the heights of world cinema this month. Nonetheless, I kind of got on with this fairly pleasurably. And Ms Alba is extremely decorative, n'est pas?
MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT,2009 (D-Jean Francois Richet) A French TV movie about the life of one their most notorious gangsters, who, a little like John Dillinger, won the affections of the public despite the nastiness of his crimes, and again, like Dillinger, was eventually assassinated by a police force frustrated with his exploits and multiple escapes from prison. A highly skilled offering in the "violent thriller" mould, equal to anything that's come out of Hollywood in the last few years, and indeed, better than most.

walking in the rain

This morning we set off to climb a nearby hill, notable for the impressive little hillfort that crowns it. Weather forecasts and local conditions appear favourable and as we arrive it is cloudy-bright and tolerably mild. It is a steep little pull of nearly 200 metres to the trig point, but at the summit the views in all directions reward the effort. For me it is an overdue cardio workout, as I have cited inclement weather as a reason not to walk for nearly a fortnight.

We stroll another couple of miles before we find a park bench at which to savour our packed lunch: Heinz mulligatawny soup and cheese and pickle rolls. However, no sooner than we had sat down when the skies darkened and a light rain began to fall. We finished lunch with some haste and made our back down the hill. Soon the rain turned to hail and then settled into a steady downpour. By the route we had taken it took nearly an hour to get back to our car, by which time, annoyingly, the weather suddenly cleared up and the sun came out. Suffice to say it was a delight to get home again, put the central heating on constant and sit in front of the fire in a welcome change of clothes.

a sharp intake of breath

A patient comes today with a series of vague symptoms including "feeling fainty", headaches and a pain in the back of one leg. With my 2 students watching I carry out a cursory examination and conclude there is nothing too much to worry about. After he has left, we discuss the patient, and one of them asks how I can be sure he hasn't got a pulmonary embolism. I finesse this issue with apparent calm, explaining that he doesn't demonstrate enough relevant features to ring my alarm bells, but inside I feel that horrible twist of fear deep in my entrails. Have I missed a PE? If so, the patient could die at any moment and he is only in his twenties. True, it is a long shot; his age is certainly on his side, but even so...

After dismissing the students at the end of surgery I do an unscheduled house call in order to examine him more carefully. True, a call in these circumstances is something more often confined to non-realistic TV series such as the execrable "Doctors", but they have undermined my self belief and I feel I must follow it up, However, the patient is not home when I call, so I must wait until Monday to find out whether he was admitted to hospital as a desperate emergency. At least I advised him to seek help immediately if there were any developments.

lazarus fails to rise from the dead

It did not, in the event, take weeks or months to sort through the 8000 or so de-deleted files PC World provided me with. In fact only about 6 hours of increasingly hopeless scrutiny was needed to sort through them. More than half came up with zilch ("that means they're lost", the PC World guy informed me helpfully). At one point I became quite excited as I realised I had come across a batch of the photos in question, but they were irrevocably degraded: in some only a quarter of the image would appear; the remainder blank. In others just a thin band of image was preserved; enough to see what the picture was, but still totally unusable.

So with sadness and resignation I returned once more to PC World today to ask for my refund. I thought there might be a problem, as I was told I should have asked before I left the store on Tuesday. But, to their credit, they took my word that I had not downloaded any of the images (they checked a few of them themselves) and returned my £99. I am left with the 320gig external hard drive which I had to buy as part of the deal, and one single, solitary image contained within an email.

They advised me to use the hard drive to back up my existing images, which doubtless I will when I work out how to do that.

mr complainy

I feel I should say a little more about complaints; not the latest, as that would not be fair to the complainant, but in general.

On average I get 2 or 3 complaints a year, usually about my attitude (and not, thankfully, about my clinical skills). That means that about 1 in every 3-4000 customers leaves my surgery sufficiently unhappy about the treatment they have had at my hands to take it further. Usually a humble apology suffices (though not always)and we move on. Only very rarely does a patient leave the practice as a consequence, or takes the complaint further. In the latter case, and over the years there have been a few, the local PCT has always found "no case to answer", perhaps because as no one else is present during the consultation, it is impossible to ascertain exactly what happened. After a complaint about my attitude i always resolve to improve my record, though I expect to continue having occasional complaints about my approach for the remainder of my career.

The question I ask myself is, if I fail in my duty of respect once every three thousand cases, but am actually better (or certainly no worse) than the average GP in the remaining 2999, how bad is that? My approach is very much "no nonsense, call it as you see it", and I concede that it doesn't suit everybody. But in any given year, how do I rate with my peers? I know some doctors (my esteemed partner, for instance) who don't get a single complaint from one year's end to the next, while others get complaints made against them nearly every month, sometimes of a much more serious nature than the ones I have to field.

Bottom line: patients do not leave in droves; in fact the list size has grown year-on-year ever since I became a fully fledged partner back in the late 1970s. So I must be doing something right...

PC World of pain

I went in to PC World to pick up my laptop this morning. Yes, all the files have been recovered, and I mean ALL. There are thousands and thousands of files, representing every site I have ever visited, every photo I have ever looked at on the web as well as the 100 photos I am interested in recovering. Many pictures appear to have degraded, though many others seem to have survived intact. To find the pictures I want looks like a gargantuan task- if it it had been one of the labours of Hercules he would have sat down and wept; I certainly feel like doing just that.

To go through all the files could take many solid days of work. I went through a few hundred while I was there, just to make sure it was worth taking it away, and that took me over an hour. So my only recourse is to work away steadily on my grand project, which may take months to complete. I shall give the reader updates on my progress from time to time. Wish me luck!

fielding a complaint

My first complaint of the year, relating to an incident some weeks ago. Truth be told, it was not one of my better performances. I immediately frame a written response, apologising for "any offence you may have felt, however inadvertent it may have been on my part" I challenge some of the more florid hyperbole of the complaint, but offer to see the patient again to meet "in a calmer atmosphere" to put things to rights. I shall keep the reader apprised of developments.

Nothing from PC World today. I shall go in myself tomorrow to hear (what I fear will be) the worst.