About three months since my last post here. Perhaps that’s good timing.
I am in Avignon at the moment where I saw this rather bizarre set of messages on a wall.
“Defense d’afficher” so perhaps I shouldn’t post anything at all?! And what about that first, overlain line? I do like seeing oddities. Here’s another from Avignon. Could be a selfie?
I’m here because I’m trying to be a little bit useful to daughter, S, as she tries to finish her own PhD while also looking after her son A, who had his first birthday here yesterday. She’s doing this while also helping her partner and A’s father who is working on his own PhD in the archives here (and in Marseille and Dignes-les-bains).
It makes an interesting start to the year and pivots me back to January 2024 which started expecting A’s arrival and was then pretty scary as S was so ill and on IV antibiotics for much of the month.
Politics
That brought back memories of my roughly 30 months of hospital medicine 1981-1983/4. The NHS and healthcare may have made huge technological progress in some areas since then but what struck me repeatedly was how desperately underfunded and less humane, less relational, everything is now. How did we as a nation get ourselves in this mess? Of course I blame a sequence of politicans but I also feel my own profession of medicine has been pathetically complicit. Has it been complicit through the sense of powerlessness that the single state funding design, which I so respect, gives the politicians such power? Not just that. I am sure it has also shared with the politicians the willingness to foreground the technological and treat all the humans in these necessarily huge and complex systems as mere cogs, subroutines in the big, distributed, program.
But that’s probably taking me back to things that I have been struggling with way back before 2024. They should get posted elsewhere when I get my thoughts more in order. Suffice for now to say that theme continued through 2024 when I needed the NHS myself. It’s also been true pretty much every time anyone else I know has needed the NHS.
Of course the NHS is just one example, the issues are threaded through all the political horrors of 2024: we have to stop subjugating ourselves to the idea of the “strong leaders” and of individualism. A few days ago, looking more hopefully to 2025, I came across this piece: Americans are taught FDR was the hero of the Great Depression. For one historian, that’s erasure. I really like the argument. It’s a short book review and recommend a look.
A year of two halves
2024 for me was divided roughly in two by a mostly work trip to Latin America in June, hence the header selfie. A return to wonders in Ecuador and then first (and for me last) trips on to Chile and to Costa Rica were pretty successful in work terms I think, though I was definitely not at my best psychologically. The trip introduced me to many wonderful people and a mind blowing amount of pre-Columban art and artefacts. Throughout my career (or should that be careers?) I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had encounters both with hugely impressive colleagues, lovely people, and also for all the other experiences I’ve been able to have that the my diversifying career allowed me.
Thoughout 2024 there were many changes for our nuclear and extended families. It sometimes felt that A’s arrival was of a baby bursting from the waters and sending waves out in all directions. (Think Boticelli’s Venus mutated through Roy Lichtenstein perhaps, oops, sorry, madness poking through?!) That’s not fair to A, many, many of the changes were not to do with his so welcome arrival at all!
That’s all important work in progress as we all get older and not necessarily wiser (I am trying!) nor necessarily more grown up (yes, I’m absolutely not up for that!) So back to Avignon curiosities …
Those glorious faces are actually stacked on top of each other. I think that’s a selfie again but with me in slightly calmer mode and I like the suggestion of fruits to come. (Mind you, I’ve never been able to grow that sort of facial flowerings.)
2025
So what about 2025? Through 2024 I have been trying to make a lot of changes, but trying to do them a bit more gently and the meta-aim is less of the self-imposed imperatives, fewer of those “musts” and “shoulds” and more trying to find ways that are softer and catch gravitational and interpersonal flows in the world.
Physically, I have accepted that my skiing days are over. Back in February, as I skied for the last time, my body warned me it did me incredibly well for 66/67 years but can no longer be trusted. That was followed by serious back trouble for the first ime in my life in July. Fortunately the worst of that seems over and has taught me things that I simply have to accept that I can and cannot do. The skiing side is sad but realistic and overall it’s been a reminder to try to cherish my body’s generally loyal services but to respect it with more exercise but exercise in a new mode without the old idea that the muscles, joints and bones will just do what I want, a spirit of greater tolerance when it remind me of the limits!
There are parallels in the psychological realm to the physical/physiological and I’ve been reviewing my work. If you are interested in the gory details, I did try to make them make some sense in my last work post of 2024: https://www.psyctc.org/psyctc/2024/12/07/what-have-i-done-in-2024/.
Yes, I do know there is much more to anyone’s psyche than work. However, as someone who hasn’t really worked for the money for eight years now, but who still works well over a 40 hour week, I would be a self-deluding idiot not to recognise that work is a huge and central part of my self and isn’t going away. When I am achieving work things I feel good!
I think the thinking does mean that 2025 is going to be quite a pivotal year. I want to shift the bulk of the work I do from clearing old projects and move to the things that I really want to achieve. Those things generally have roots in thinking that I started sometimes even before my first ward days so they often go back 40 years. Some I have been playing with, sometimes doing a bit on over that time, however, almost none of them ever got solid lumps of time. Some of them do have links with my disgust with so much of the way the UK, global north, hm, global, social and political world seems so tragically misguided, destructive (see the start of this above!)
I have no illusions that these projects that I am finally going to be a bit more courageous about, that I am finally going to give more time, are earth shattering. I know they won’t dent any of our political, sociological madness. However, I’ll be sad if I snuff it or lose sufficient cognitive capacity to still work and I haven’t at least tried to take some of them through to some sorts of fruition.
Best foot forward Christopher: “adelante” (“onwards”: family of origin joke!)
