Here’s me, running alongside my chum Bob, in Cambridge parkrun. I look fresh and alert, mainly because we’ve just set off. The boy on the left beat us both. Shouldn’t he be be glued to his PlayStation on a Saturday morning rather than showing up senior citizens? Anyway, I’m steadily upping the running. Since the last blog I’ve done a couple of 10k races and a few hour training runs plus a 90 minute session, all without any problems.

Today’s Cambridge parkrun went well. We charged around the narrow country park trail paths like stampeding wildebeests (without anyone being trampled, to my knowledge). 579 ran, ran/walked or walked and it took 35 volunteers to put it on. I did my best time this year but it’s not about speed, is it? It’s not even officially regarded as a race despite the results statistics which record time, placement in time order and personal bests. Nevermind the built in contradictions, it’s a marvellous modern institution and growing healthily.

Mmmmm……. a pair of lips, the first of two. I haven’t given much time to model making recently because other things have got in the way.The ideas keep pinging into my head and they’ll get executed eventually.

Gosport War Memorial Hospital, Hampshire. The independent report found that 456 patients’ lives were shortened because they were given opioid drugs without clinical justification. A further 200 patients are implicated but records are missing. There was a “disregard for human life and a culture of shortening the lives of a large number of patients.” A single GP who worked as a clinical assistant at the hospital, routinely overprescribed drugs for her patients. Nursing staff raised concerns about her prescribing practice as far back as 1988. A staff meeting held in 1991 for nurses to address these issues “had the effect of silencing the nurses’ concerns”. Consultants were aware of the prescribing practice but did not intervene. Nurses did not exercise their responsibility to challenge the overprescribing and continued to administer the drugs Relatives’ complaints and questioning about the safety and appropriateness of care were not heeded by those in authority. And so on.

This is a huge tragedy and a terrible indictment of the moral judgement, apathy, unwillingness to act responsibly, willingness to uphold reputation at any cost and capacity to look away, of a very large number of people. This hospital, in part, was a killing machine. The investigation and inquiries should not be held out of the public gaze nor degenerate into a “truth commission”.