David Payne: Continuous publication
30 Jun, 08 | by BMJ Group
Continuous publication marks a significant shift in BMJ’s publishing cycle. From now on we will be populating bmj.com with lots of new content on a daily basis, instead of using the weekly print issue as the catalyst for a mass upload of articles. The homepage will change more frequently (as well as the pages showing latest news, research comment and education), and there will be a rolling table of contents that will show every article published in the past seven days. more…
The waiting is nearly over. After months of speculation, expectation, consultation, and criticism, the Darzi report on the future direction of the NHS in England comes out on Monday. Polyclinics will be part of it, but there will be much more besides. 
Far out. About as far away as you can get; 300 km above the Arctic circle in Tromso, Norway, at the 
Do art and misery share a bed? Although we might expect art to entertain and even, at a push, to improve its audience, artists themselves are surely supposed to suffer. It is part of the job spec. 
The annual 
Two weeks ago I sang the “Winkle Song” in the excellent acoustic of the Oxford Union. I’m a terrible singer, and it must have been excruciating for the audience. But I’m confident that it was less excruciating than me delivering my speech against the motion “This house believes the NHS is only safe in government hands.” 
“I want to live”, read the caption to the life-size photograph of a young man attached to the dialysis machine. I had seen this photograph at a hospital gate in Nepal almost everyday for three months before I came to London two weeks ago, and it is likely that it is still there. Surprisingly, he is not asking anyone to donate him a kidney. He has already found a suitable donor. All he is asking for is money to cover the travel, transplantation and drug costs. 
Has anyone ever studied why life speeds up the older you get? John Mortimer (in The Summer of a Dormouse – which should be required reading for any geriatrics rotation) puts it beautifully … “In childhood, the afternoons spread out for years. For the old, the years flicker past like the briefest of afternoons. The playwright Christopher Fry, now 93, told me that after the age of 80 you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes.” 
Latest dilemma: how to behave with chronic, serious disease? I’m finding it difficult to know how to present myself. I don’t feel like an invalid, whatever that means these days. Yet I’m too tired and preoccupied to participate in the world in a normal, here-and-now way. 