Jon Stamford

Last weekend was pretty intense, in some ways enriching and in other ways diminishing. Let me explain.

I grew up in a family where books were considered almost sacred objects, their acquisition a source of delight, their loss a bereavement. Both my parents came from what would then have been called working class families. Books were a luxury, with maximum value obtained by passing the books around the family. No sooner had one finished a book than it was passed on to the next child. Books were important. By sharing, everyone formed an opinion that they could then discuss. Books encouraged critical debate by the same means.

My father was probably the least broadly read, focusing his reading matter on the mainly factual, perhaps a hangover from his days at Cambridge as an undergraduate medical student where the fixation on fact over fiction remained the principal legacy of his alma mater. He was after all a medical student not a classicist. If you had to remember the cranial nerves via colourful mnemonics, it’s easy to imagine that there was no time or space left to fill with Aristotle, Socrates or Plato. I remember he once read Richard Gordon’s entire output in an afternoon. Having thus slaked his thirst for materia medica, he swiftly moved on to James Herriot, perhaps reasoning that veterinary medicine was at least still medicine, if he reasoned it out at all. Being a GP in Doncaster amounted to many largely thankless hours and my enduring memory, while I was of school age, was of a man, dog tired, asleep on the sofa. Not really of a reading man.

My mother on the other hand devoured books like a paperback piranha. Her tastes leaned towards the more romantic end of literature albeit with a fondness for books involving naval officers (my father was in the Navy when she had met him). She loved the Master and Commander series. Otherwise it was Maeve Binchy and suchlike.

Why is any of this relevant? Well, last weekend my three children were here. The plan was simple – to boldly go into those reaches of the attic where unwanted items lived, where aged footballs lay among the dust of decades. Many boxes were unopened having been transferred from our previous house to the present, around 30 years ago. The children’s battlecry, “If you haven’t opened the box in 30 years, it can go!”, although entirely understandable, needed a degree of tempering by myself. Mostly the contents of the boxes were uninteresting – odd bits of electronics, long dysfunctional hi-fi, and computers using operating systems no longer used. And of course the inevitable mixture of ‘artworks’ by the children. On the whole these works of art tended to be abstract rather than strictly representational. Impressionist so to speak.

We also discovered a great many books of every conceivable genre and detail. Pulp paperbacks sat cheek by jowl with the great works of English literature. Shakespeare? Obviously. But also others less obvious. “Cider with Rosie” by Laurie Lee, Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and Hemingway’s “a Farewell to Arms”. Great books by great authors, each in its own way a pinnacle of teenage angst, a battle of art and acne.

My eldest, taking me quietly aside, explained what was to happen. “Dad” she said “we have to get rid of these books”. While she sat me down to explain, my younger daughter was tiptoeing out of the building on armfuls of my prized books.

Suddenly, a delightful revisiting of our respective childhoods, uncovering buried treasure, had taken on the air of a Nazi book burning. I called a halt once I realised the indiscriminate nature of their process. Some supervision was absolutely essential once I realised the kids made no distinction between cheap insulation paperbacks and Hemingway first editions.

Books, even under the present Tory administration, a particularly Luddite regime, are not yet to be used as fuel. But gradually I began to realise that, if we were to fulfil our mission of clearing space in the attic, a great many books had to go. Like Oscar Schindler I could only save just so many. And for every one that was drowned, I tried to save one.

There is no foolproof way of applying any selection criteria. The human decision has to take priority. So with that in mind I pronounced yea or nay, like some Roman emperor, on the fates of several hundred books. My criteria were to the outside observer, capricious. I tried to retain walks that I thought I would possibly read (Brick Lane, Rites of Passage, The Bonfire of the Vanities) whilst being unable to throw away some tomes with, how shall I put it, sentimental associations. Retained under those criteria were the entire works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, aforementioned Hemingway and a first edition of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

I would like to say it was a job well done. But, in all honesty, I don’t know whether it was or not. A number of books made it out of the house without my explicit say-so. But I don’t really think of the books being lost. More a case of being adopted by new readers. My loss is Oxfam’s gain.

Yes I thought that will get your attention.

I’ve come to realise that most wildlife photography is fundamentally about food and sex. No, I don’t mean breakfast in bed or offering the last of the After Eight to the wife before testing the bed springs to destruction. Wildlife photography calls for extraordinary patience and stoicism from its practitioners. Sometimes filming in hostile environments simply in order to make a particular point may be essential to illustrate a particular argument. Sometimes a given shot presents itself on a platter more or less. Sometimes in the case of wildlife literally so. But mostly

Every year, my elder daughter and I visit the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition at the Natural History Museum. It’s become a habit. The judges, some half-dozen photographers, biologists and researchers are, every year, tasked with sifting more than 30,000 photographs in 16 categories, everything from the sex life of Southern Right Whales (believe me, if you were a diver, you would not wish to be caught in the middle of that) to animals eating each other.

Whether we like it or not, many animals eat other animals, in many cases while still alive. The Yucatan rat snake devouring a bat (Fernando Constantino Martinez Belmar) is sufficient to put you off your lunch. Equally, the battle between the grizzly bears and sockeye salmon seems unequal with such vividly red fish (Adam Rice). Nature seems to have screwed up here. Obviously the magnificent crimson helps to attract a mate and comes in handy further up the stream. But it also makes you a very attractive seafood platter as far as the bears are concerned. Far be it from me to question the Almighty’s plans but I can’t help thinking that staying a murky sort of khaki colour whilst passing the bears and then changing into your cardinal costume would be a better gig. You obviously make a much less attractive suitor when missing a head for instance. But then I suppose we wouldn’t have bears since the salmon are their main diet.

Bears are naturally inquisitive, polar bears particularly so. Dmitri Koth’s image of a polar bear gazing out of a derelict building’s window with a sort of watching-the-world-though-by expression makes him look particularly cuddly and not in any respect the murderous apex predator he actually is. If you want cuddly, Douglas Kimesy’s lockdown adoption of the wombats fits the bill nicely.

All of animal life is there, from intimate little moments to big broad brush commentaries on deforestation or sweeping vistas of wildebeest on migration. If I’m honest, I am not crazy about bugs, even very colourful bugs. Same goes for the bizarre underwater spiders and jellyfish. Very pretty, lots of colours, really not my thing.

Some pictures made me angry. A Brydes whale being choked by discarded fishing net (Judith van der Griendt) or a spectacled bear puzzled at his diminished environment (Daniel Mideros) some were somehow redeeming. My personal favourite was of a 13 year old mountain gorilla,Ndakasi, dying peacefully of a virus in a park ranger’s arms.

Perhaps most remarkable are the photographs taken by children, some 10 years and younger. And often with spectacularly expensive kit. It probably says more about my innate cynicism that makes me question the authenticity of such pictures. Put another way, who set up the shot? Who pressed the shutter. Or perhaps it’s just jealousy of such talent. But I can’t help feeling that the parents of Amaya Shah (close-up picture of two male lions) were somewhat abrogating their responsibilities in allowing Amaya within only a few metres of the lions, however cuddly they appeared. Apex predators. My mother would shoo away small terriers in the street, let alone lions. And Jack Russells are not apex predators. Not by a long chalk.

I come from a family of health workers – nurses, paramedics, doctors, pharmacists and medical researchers. My own mother was a nurse and my father a doctor. To see nurses on strike is heartbreaking. But to understand the reasons is even more so. I’m told that nursing pay has fallen by around 20% over the last decade in real terms. This is not a political issue – it has fallen under both Labour and Conservative governments. It is simply a wilful failure to recognise or understand what nurses do – because, if they did understand, they would of course wish to reflect their commitment to their patients with salaries appropriate to their skills and learning.

Or so you might think. Even Boris Johnson, acknowledging that he owed his life after Covid infection to the actions of nurses he even went so far as naming publicly, became amnesic when asked about salaries in the sector. Cheaper to praise than to pay.

There are even those, unbelievable though it seems, who see fit to criticise nurses To hear nurses criticised by those who have never emptied a bedpan in their lives, changed a septic dressing or held a dying person’s hand is particularly galling. This is the first time nurses have gone on strike. Try to imagine how desperate they must be to do so. Desperate enough to leave the health service in many cases. Over the last year alone more than 40,000 nurses have left the NHS.

Parliament is full of specious reasons why nurses cannot be payed more. Most cynically risible up of all – the country cannot afford to increase their salaries – is palpably absurd. Over the last decade MP salaries have risen by 28% (from £65,738 £84,144. Nursing salaries, in real terms, have fallen by more than 20%.

Six years ago, I was taken as an emergency by ambulance to hospital and operated on. I was in hospital for a week, nursed by a team of nurses. Three years ago I was involved in a pretty horrible car crash which broke bones. It took weeks of nursing before I was back to something approaching normal. A year ago I had some very specialist brain surgery done (and no, I was not having a brain inserted). I was nursed, in rotation by some six nurses. I would not be alive were it not for nurses.

So before you criticise them ask yourself this one question. What do you do on any day of your life that matches what they do on every day of their life?

Now watch this video. It will help you understand

It’s that time of year when the clatter of charity boxes fills the air as so many charities compete for our attention. Especially this year, when we can barely afford to feed ourselves, the charities seen especially sharp pricks to the conscience. Just when we were beginning to be comfortable with the idea of cutting back on superfluous expenditure – and that includes for the purposes of this discussion charity donations – than we are accosted by earnest young men called Tristan or Sebastien in floral tabards outside Sainsbury’s, anxious to explain the importance of the charity and why it should be particularly deserving of our support.

In case you ever need to know about providing proper treatment for traumatised donkeys (or it comes up as a question in the pub quiz) PTSD is rife amongst the retired donkey population.

Apparently.

And when questioned by Tristan about the lives of these donkeys, he paints (with the help of a folder filled with pictures of some very glum donkeys). I reach for a fiver in my pocket. He reacts like a Bateman cartoon, affronted that I should do something so vulgar. No, he wants me to sign up to pay a pound a month or whatever it is.

I’m happy to hand over a fiver to assuage my conscience but I balk at making a long-term commitment to Eeyore. Tristan doesn’t give up that easily. He assures me that I can cancel at any time. But then Sky said much the same and it’s taken me nearly a month to rid myself of the last vestiges of them and their satanic satellites. I reassure Tristan that I am interested in supporting these unhappy ungulates but I will need to check out some details first on their website. Apparently they don’t have a website. Peals of alarm bells ring out.

The same day I am approached by the Cats protection league (I didn’t know there was such a thing), a charity aiming to rehouse immigrant families down on their luck, one about rare childhood cancers, and the usual Injured Jockeys Association, Cure Parkinson’s and RNLI.

A total, including the nondigital donkeys, of seven charities in one day. So what do you do? A fiver to each (or at least those who will take your money)? Or should I give more to some than others? Who is the more deserving? And how could you even begin to decide?

Let’s have a go. Bottom of the pile is the Cats protection league. Well, and this should bring down the hate mail like lava from a volcano, I don’t give them a very high ranking. I should probably declare my hand here. I don’t like cats. Never have. Had it been dogs, that would be different. But cats go to the bottom of the pile. For the moment at least.

What comes next? I guess it has to be the donkeys. On the basis that we should probably put human charities above animals. Or should we? I have watched jockeys in action and not been impressed. Whipping animals bred purely for our pleasure as a vehicle for betting doesn’t seem to me to be something I would wish to support. I don’t wish injury on anyone but horses are relatives of donkeys and I feel the need to strike a blow for the donkeys. Sorry jockeys, wrong place at the wrong time. You are now nestling between the cats and the donkeys.

Okay, the next rung on the ladder of misery is probably the RNLI. I think really this harks back to our imperialist yearnings propped up by a long naval tradition. Don’t get me wrong – the RNLI does indeed do a wonderful job for those who need it. But how many actually do? How many people each year are rescued by lifeboats? It’s somewhere in the region of 400 lives (human) each year saved by the lifeboats. And some animals although I don’t have a breakdown for donkeys.

Parkinson’s? I can hardly be expected to answer that one. Yes, Parkinson’s is indeed rubbish. It’s no fun to have. So yes I would like to see a cure. That would prevent more than a thousand deaths each year. But is it more deserving somehow than the 400 saved by the lifeboats. Parkinson’s is, after all (and we can argue over the details as much as we like) still mainly a disease of old age, of people who have had some sort of life at least. I don’t know for a fact but I guess that most of those lives saved by lifeboats are probably younger people, adventurers given a second chance.

You have to factor in quality of life, duration of life saved and the whole bundle of other policy assessments that make for some very heavy mathematics. And if you go down that route, where do you put the rare childhood cancers? Many of those lives are snuffed out so early that it is impossible to assess what they might have become. But there are very few. Should I factor that into my calculations? I just wish I had paid more attention in bioethics class.

Humans and animals? It’s not really possible to answer these questions. Do you distribute your dosh proportionally, giving more to childhood cancer research than unwanted moggies? And what about those website-free donkeys? Or do we ignore distribution and simply give whatever we have in our pockets to whoever appears in front of us?

Don’t ask me. These are questions for God and gods.

In any case, I love cats. But I can never finish a whole one…

When I was sent to boarding school at Marlborough, it was instilled in us from day one that we were expected to be competitive both academically and on the playing fields and athletics track. I needed no telling. For the previous 13 years my father had instilled in me his intense competitive streak.

“It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part” my mother would counterpoint in order to perhaps blunt my father’s innate competitiveness. My father’s notion of competition was very much along the lines of lots of boys taking part in sporting events but with the Stamfords winning. This in turn became his own personal mantra some years later of “family first, everyone else nowhere”. There was no sporting or competitive event too small for him to take an interest if there was a better than evens chance of winning. Before the egg and spoon race, he would check out the eggs and spoons for the appropriate weight, shape and degree of depth and brief his offspring accordingly.

“Okay Jonathan, it’s a shallow teaspoon with a size 3 hens egg, slightly blunted. Try to get thee speckled one. Don’t go off too fast – let the others go ahead at a faster pace. Their eggs will fall off. Keep your speed steady but not maximum. Look to close in over the last ten yards. Got it?”

I nodded. I was four.

I tried to focus but with the best will in the world it was a lot of information to take in for a four year old. If I won I would get a brief but affectionate tousling of the hair. If I lost I got my mother’s voice instead with the bit about taking part. Either way I would still get my father’s analysis.

And God help us if we stepped outside the rules (even of the egg and spoon race). He abhorred cheating. Competition meant nothing if you cheated. Stern dressing downs followed any whiff of impropriety, any hint of a misdemeanour. He would punish us with that most brutal of sanctions, his disinterest. He would take no further interest in any sport or competition in which we had cheated. Which was very very few.

But it worked. I am competitive in many areas of life – in sport (stop laughing), research et cetera. Even writing – I want my writing to be appreciated, for it to be competitive with the best. I know I’m not there yet. I can think of plenty of writers whose books I admire but know that I cannot reach their pinnacles. But I try. I am my father’s son. I hope I have inherited the best of him and not the more tetchy withdrawn version of his last few years as a widower. It was not how he wanted it.

I make my father sound a tyrant, remote and disengaged. Nothing could be further from the truth. He had ways of rewarding us children with his interest. He had a way of making our world his. If we were interested in cricket or football he would make sure he was knowledgeable enough to be part of the conversation. He would ask for my thoughts on Edrich or Boycott as openers for England, whether Tommy Smith was too impetuous at full-back for Liverpool, whether it would be Connors or Rosewall at Wimbledon.

What we didn’t realise was that he was sharpening our social skills. He despised knee-jerk responses to questions. He wanted us to reason and argue. It was an education far greater than I was aware of at the time. Those lessons have stuck with me throughout my life. And those of my brother and sister.

And we are competitive even within the family. For instance I played intermittently for my local village’s 4th XI. My brother had a trial for Yorkshire, even bowling a future test opener in his short spell. My son appears to have acquired his uncle’s rather than his father’s cricketing skills.

Basically, we were competitive kids and became competitive adults.

I don’t know why I seem to have exempted my mother from all this, perhaps conveying – erroneously as it happens – the notion that she believed only in taking part. But in her own ways she was every bit as fierce a competitor. A game of Scrabble or canasta brought out the worst in her. She took defeat badly and was known to upend the Scrabble table when facing defeat.

Only once did she accept a defeat when playing an ageing Dowager aunt from Pietermaritzburg who played Scrabble to an almost international level. She would visit us for a month every summer, driving my mother to distraction and subjecting her to daily linguistic beatings. On the last day of her holiday before we shipped the old bat out to South Africa again, my mother had the letters in her hand to win the game but generously and perhaps wisely chose not to win. I still don’t think that aunt Ivy was quite ready for CLITORIS across a triple word score.

Every day I take levodopa, rasagiline, entacapone, carbidopa, propranolol, metformin, simvastatin, benserazide, clonazepam, rotigotine and a modest number of vitamin supplements. These amount to 19 tablets/capsules/patches usually at six timed intervals. That’s 133 a week, 6935 a year. Yes, count them.

Some are delivered to me in bottles, others in those infernal blister packs which seem to serve little purpose other than to destroy one’s nails. They certainly don’t make it easy.

And they come in pretty much every colour of the rainbow, albeit with a preponderance of white. My propranolol tablets are a rather fetching pink (usually – occasionally they are white thus making them indistinguishable from the amitriptyline tablets of the same dose and in identical packaging) and have the letters embossed on them although you would need the magnification of the Hubble space telescope to read them, so minuscule are they.

Two tablets, on the face of it identical, are apparently distinguishable as well. Clonazepam (pale whitish peach) and simvastatin (pale peachy white) I understand can be distinguished from each other by their embossed lettering. Clonazepam also has a kind of score mark down the middle. No chance of a drug error there then.

I’m told that you can have your daily tablets lovingly sealed into your own personal blister packs by your pharmacist should you so wish. Also, bearing in mind just had diabolically difficult blister packs can be, deliberately sequestering one’s medication into such an inaccessible format seems perverse.

Moreover the resulting blister packs (certainly those that I’ve seen) are virtually the size of an A4 document wallet. And secondly, as was the case this month, pharmacists make mistakes. In this case they managed to double the dose of one of my drugs. Oh well, that’s life (or death).

There are some medications where this makes little difference but in the case of others can have serious consequences. At the end of the day it is quite important to be able to distinguish your different drugs especially when, as in my case, there are so many.

There is also the psychology of colour to factor in. For example, drugs affecting the heart and circulation tend to be red, orange or yellow – bright colours for brighter days. Conversely drugs affecting the mind and brain tend to be more muted – muted purples and blues, perhaps hinting at the dark arts of psychopharmacology and neuropharmacology.

These are not just mere flights of fancy. The colours and shapes of tablets to reflect marketing considerations and integral part of the overall promotion [1]. A recent paper found that different shapes of tablet also has an effect on patient responses [2].

Of course little of this applies to generic drugs. Once a drug’s patent expires it is a free for all. Every Tom, Dick or Harry can make and market their own version of Sinemet. And they don’t have to make it even look like the original’s comforting pastel pink and baby blue capsules.

Generic drugs are a minefield in terms of regulation. But that’s for another day.

[1] Drug Tablet Design: Why Pills Come in So Many Shapes and Sizes. https://ftloscience.com/drug-tablet-design/

[2] Olesya Blazhenkova, Kivilcim Dogerlioglu-Demi. The shape of the pill: Perceived effects, evoked bodily sensations and emotions. PLoS One. 2020; 15(9): e0238378. published online 2020 Sep 8. doi: 10.1371

As many of you know, I had a DBS operation (deep brain stimulation) a year ago which has given me a huge new lease of life. But you still have to be on the ball to avoid circumstances that will disable the apparatus.

It’s a party trick for many Parkies to switch off their DBS to demonstrate how quickly their symptoms, particularly tremor, return sometimes even to the extent of being unable to restart the device. I tend to eschew these kind of demonstrations – I’m not a performing seal despite my flappy fins. No exhibiti in a freakshow. I won’t perform for your entertainment.

A situation we DBS chappies are invited to avoid is that of the metal detectors used by airports. There have been occasions I gather when such devices have switched off cardiac pacemakers and, since the DBS system is fundamentally a brain pacemaker, one can reasonably suppose that the same might apply. With that in mind I’m quite belligerent about these portals.

Returning from Paris on the Eurostar last weekend I was faced with just such a scenario. Younger daughter waltzes through the portal without so much as a bleep or a ping. But no way am I going to do the same.

“S’il vous plait monsieur” I call out to the armed officer standing disinterested nearby. He strolls over languidly with a vague air of irritation at the Englishman who had torn him away from an interesting conversation with a very fetching female colleague.

“Monsieur?” he says

I point to the gate portal and say in what I think is pretty decent French when you consider the last lesson I had was nearly 50 years ago. “Je suis desolee mais je ne peut pas passer par ce porte la parce que j’ai un pacemaker” I gesture to my chest.

“stimulateur cardiaque”. I emphasise, leaving nothing to chance (and suddenly remembering the word).

“Pas de probleme, monsieur” he says and points to a small paragraph of text in French, English and German explaining that the portal is safe for people with pacemakers “in the majority of cases”.

Now, I don’t know about you but for me “the majority of cases” falls a little way short of the kind of reassurance I need in this situation. So I have to raise the stakes and it is at this point that I have a mental block and forget the word for doctor (which is of course ‘medecin’ as I recall a few minutes later) and substitute the halfway plausible ‘docteur’ which sounds like it could be right.

“Mon docteur m’a dit absolument pas” I say, throwing in an appropriate gesture of finality to emphasise the point.

Meanwhile, younger daughter turns round to see what the kerfuffle is all about. This confuses the customs man.

“Your docteur?” He says pausing briefly before his lightbulb moment “your daughter”. He points to my daughter. This confuses matters further.

“My daughter” I say abandoning all efforts at French “not my doctor”.

Younger daughter decides that we stand a better chance of getting through the gate if we fess up about the DBS.

“It’s not really a pacemaker “she begins, thereby immediately attracting the attention of the customs officials who now feel they have been misled. “It’s a brain pacemaker” she says and points to my head.

“zen ‘e can go through ze gate.” says the customs man.

Younger daughter shakes her head slowly for extra gravitas. “No” she says. “If he goes through this portal” she says suddenly and forcefully extending her arms widely “his head will explode “

“Pouf- just like that” she adds for emphasis.

Well-intentioned though her intervention doubtless is, it becomes immediately apparent that words like “explode” are not ones to use in the presence of security type people. Especially those who don’t speak English. And have guns.

There is a brief sound of holsters being unclipped, guns cocked. In what felt like a lifetime but was probably only a few seconds, the security guards realise that I am no threat to them (especially with an imminently exploding head). They offer to search me instead which seems a much more reasonable prospect. I immediately volunteer to be searched by the rather gorgeous blonde but in the end it is the rather rough and unshaven Neanderthal. Still, better than having an exploding head.

A small American child, behind us in the queue, is visibly disappointed. After all, an exploding head is not something you see every day. Even in America. Sorry lad, can’t help.

“Today, as we say goodbye to Mrs Truss, we can be proud of our Tory MPs. For this, fellow vegetables, is not simply a victory for one iceberg lettuce. This is a victory for all lettuces – Lolo Rosso, friseee, endive, romaine and beyond. Indeed lettuces throughout the country can hold their heads high and be satisfied with work well done. Mrs truss has learnt the true strength of the salad lobby. No longer will lettuces be marginalised to small side dishes. Lettuces throughout the country can expect, nay demand, to be centre plate.

And it doesn’t stop at lettuces. Radishes, cherry tomatoes, sliced beans in vinaigrette can emerge from the shadows and take their rightful place on the dinnerplate. We have a right to speak under right to be heard.

The Tories have led the country for too long. It is time for salad items and vegetables in general to stand up and be counted. I believe we need a swift transition of power from Mrs Truss and her government and I will expect to appoint my cabinet within a week. This will be a cabinet without prejudice against minority groups and, yes, sprouts will be represented in this new government of vegetable unity as we move into the broad sunlit uplands of consensus politics. I thank you for your attention”.