like mother like daughter

My mum often goes shopping at the supermarket at the weekend. She carefully makes a list of everything she wants to buy, going through the cupboards to see what we've run out of, and asking everyone around if there's anything they want. She then forgets to take the list, and ends up buying whatever random stuff she happens to see on the shelves. She does this every weekend. But here's the scary part - I did exactly the same thing last weekend! So this is what I have to look forward to. A lifetime of forgotten shopping lists. Speaking of supermarkets, why is it always the most embarrassing item in your basket that the check-out guy can't scan properly?

trials and tribulations

I went to a really inspiring seminar yesterday, given by Sir Iain Chalmers, who has been (to mention one of his achievements) director of the Cochrane collaboration. He talked about lots of really important topics in healthcare. One that I was particularly interested in, since it is close to my area of research, was his discussion of research synthesis in reports of clinical trials. For a long time he has been arguing that research papers describing clinical trials should put their results in the context of previous research, including a research synthesis (or meta-analysis) to update existing knowledge with the new evidence gained from the trial being reported. To someone not involved in clinical research this may not seem a terribly important matter. But here is just one of the examples (and a particularly heart-rending one) that he gave of how this might have helped in the past. For a long time parents were advised to let babies sleep on their fronts, until evidence came to light of an increased risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in babies sleeping in this position. Trials were carried out as early as the 1970's, and if a systematic research synthesis had been conducted after each trial this fact would have been recognised much earlier, potentially saving the lives of thousands of babies. Even though the seminar room was packed with people, you could have heard a pin drop at this point. It really brought home to me how incredibly important is all the work being done in this area, and how much I love being a part of that (even a very small one!)

tax arrears

It is not often that the tax-man brings good news. But this week he is my very best friend (or maybe even she - I am a feminist after all) . It turns out that so far I've been paying the top rate of tax on my whole salary. Basically this means that the amount of money that gets dumped into my bank account once a month is going to be considerably larger in future. Plus I should get a nice lump sum at some point repaying me for all the surplus taxes I've been giving the government. All drinks are on me in future!

And here's a strange thing. For years I've had this feeling I'm constantly tired, sometimes sleeping up to ten hours a night. But now I'm getting better - still sleeping more than average, but sometimes I can get through a whole day with no caffeine! I wonder if it has something to do with Chris's cooking. When I was on my own I would often go days without meat, but Chris's whole family is obsessed with protein, and meat in particular. They even put chopped up meat into his sister's baby food - I guess it had some effect, she ended up representing Greece as a weight-lifter!

And they say good news comes in threes - Chris has found a job at last. He's going to be working in a new restaurant in Cambridge (possibly as a manager part-time).

I'm really hoping this patch of good karma never ends.