I used to be “Mister Disinvestment.” Now I would like to be Mister Investment and say, “Come! Come and be part of an exciting, exhilarating process. Come in! Come in on the ground floor and see a people do something that’s probably never happened before, people seeking to become something radically different from what their antecedents would have made us believe they were likely to become.

This morning I decided I am not going to take a job that I’ve been offered.

When I now think of how the uncertainty about my own future, and the proximity of death, threw me into torment, careering wildly between hope and despair, I look back in wonder at how little I thought about the effect I had on my own patients after I had spoken to them. I did worry that if my tone of voice was too pessimistic the poor patient might spend what little time they had left feeling deeply depressed, simply waiting to die. So I tried to find a balance between telling them the truth and not depriving them of hope. After a patient died, I only occasionally heard back from the family, so I had little way of knowing whether the way I had spoken to them was appropriate or not.

I vowed never to marry, but we got married as soon as we could after lockdown. I used to think it was patriarchal but when same-sex marriage became legal, I thought: OK, great, this institution has finally changed.

I can’t say it.

Making people smaller than they are because of something they can’t handle in themselves.

Just. Hanging. On.

Somebody once told me I was the spitting image of David Cameron.

The internet. Such potential for good and for levelling up the world, but such a quagmire in reality.

My first holy communion, where my trousers were too big for me and fell down, a circumstance which earned me both the instant contempt of the girls and the heightened interest of the priests. That’s just how it was in 1975.