From The Kitchen Table

Category: Kitchen Table Chat

  • Hanging up her dancing shoes?

    So, it looks like Hillary’s going to be handing in her pass after today’s primaries. Politically minded friends keep saying how absolutely riveting the competition for the Democratic nomination has been. Which it has of course but which I’ve found very unsettling. I don’t have a deep enough knowledge of the US political scene to…

  • Today’s Google celebration

    At the weekend I returned to my alma mater, St Thomas’ Hospital in London to re-unite with other survivors of my set who began training together at the Nightingale School. This is the weekend that is always set aside for such a meeting of the Fellowship because it is the nearest to the birthday, today,…

  • My 10 pence worth

    I don’t normally do politics on the blog – there are just too many commentators out there and to keep up seems to mean spending a lot of time at the computer – and I am basically a bit lazy about that. But this week has been a real treat for everyone, not only anoraks…

  • 90 years on

    The English department at Oxford University is running a project archiving WWI memorabilia and it’s stirred me into doing something I should have started a long while ago. My great aunt, Bessie Marks who trained as a nurse in 1908 was a WWI nurse posted to Whalley Bridge Military Hospital near Manchester and after her…

  • City links

    There was once a book called the Shell Guide to London Weekends which featured ways in which Londoners could amuse themselves. Two sections always worried me slightly, mainly because I wrote them. Those sections are about ice skating (which I knew something about) and kite flying which I didn’t. Fortunately the book is decades out…

  • And about time

    Well, it’s another year and not only have I not made any resolutions, I’ve broken them all already. As a Guardian columnist remarked, once the big one, stopping smoking, has been cracked one ought to be excused and so I do. My plan, and I put it no firmer than that, was to write a…

  • Angels over Africa

    I’e just been given a lovely present which pleases on several fronts. Firstly, because it’s from a friend who I’ve not seen for 6 years because she lives in South Africa and I don’t and secondly because it is a pretty thing which is designed for a Christmas tree. This means that after its festive…

  • Those Oxford dinners

    Reuters fellows who remember the dinner seminars will remember the man who cooked them. I really don’t think this could happen to a nicer person. Just after the College kitchen had been refurbished Jim took me to have a look. I was astonished to see the ceiling in the main kitchen and said ‘you’ve got…

  • Here’s a story

    Picture: Student nurses with ward sister, St Thomas’ Hospital circa 1965 Here is quite a long story about the first journalist I ever met. It took place a long time ago in the middle of the night at St Thomas’s Hospital. I was, for the first time, the senior night nurse on duty which both…

  • Men of Straw

    Talking of Leeds, where I was at the weekend, I noted the board in the student’s union where the names of the past presidents are noted and their year of service. Naturally, I looked for Jack Straw, the most famous of these. Somewhat depressingly his year, 1969 has a nasty scratched out blank next to…