I’ve been quiet on here for a good while as the realities of online teaching bit towards the end of last term, and spill over marking coupled with another lockdown made January a rather bleak month. I sense from the less-frequent diary posts of others that everyone is feeling the weight of it all. Understandably so, given that we’re expected t...  Read this >>

It has been 1 year and 4 days since I posted my first COVI-19 Diary entry, and despite a month of marking and commitments it is time to get back in the saddle and write. I started working on COVID on February 12th 2020, emerging from a state of general interest flowing from working in Global Health to specific need to engage. Like so many things as an aca...  Read this >>

‘Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next.’ When reflecting on a year of living through a pandemic, I found myself returning to Lewis Carroll’s classics, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking...  Read this >>

Joe Biden is the first president whose tenure will be defined and dominated by health issues. The pandemic has exposed the flaws and vulnerabilities of the healthcare system, and any attempt to preserve the link between employment and access to healthcare is doomed to failure in a country of more than 30 million unemployed. The social and other problems c...  Read this >>

1,564 deaths from COVID-19 were announced today in my home country the UK. My family and kids are in lockdown across the UK, my eldest son determined to return to university. I have been privileged myself to take a 2 and half week break from engaging with the virus, and over 3 weeks from the diary platform. In truth, my own period of pandemic fatigue. Ret...  Read this >>

'Clap for Carers' is to return on Thursday under a new name of 'Clap for Heroes' and I feel compelled to say something. For ten weeks in a row during the first wave, every Thursday at 8 pm, here in the UK we would be called to action. Television shows would be paused as we were instructed to ‘clap for our carers.’ Every week, we were told t...  Read this >>