Pete Seeger visiting steel drum makers and players in Trinidad

Moving Doctors

• I just got round to registering with a local doctor, five years after I left the area where I was previously registered. I know this is bad. I mean it’s good to put it right, but it’s bad that it’s taken me this long. About a year of that time I was on the road, but still.
• I think I made a move towards it when I was living in Chesson Road, but I think that move was “pick up the forms from the surgery”. I don’t think it went any further.
• I’m not ill. I feel good, but clearly something has shifted, since today was the fifth day in a row that I walked more than five miles and now I’m willing to register and probably go in for a check-up. I am fortunate, I have not had any serious illnesses or injuries, I have never spent a night in hospital. I’ve had a couple of visits to A&E after carelessness on the stairs, oh and the times I dislocated my shoulders at college. I’m not a heavy user of the NHS.
• And so the medical questionnaire was straightforward. I needed to disclose that my dad had an aortic valve replacement a couple of years ago at age 74. Given the heritability of that condition, I suppose it would be sensible to have my heart checked and as I approach 50, I think they encourage you to have a range of checks regularly. Part of me says “well if you go looking for stuff, you’re likely to find it”. But I think it’s better self-care to have checks rather than self-diagnosing every twinge and soreness, every bit of life that could be a symptom of something horrible.
• It did help that I could do it all by filling in two online forms (although I rolled my eyes a bit when I had to repeat information in the second one).

“Steven Melendez asserted that monegraph could “eradicate fake digital art”, when this is exactly backwards. In fact monegraph makes it possible to have “fake digital art”, because prior to this we had no consistent way of defining an “original”.” – Anil Dash