Dubai Miracle Garden and the strange lack of insects

I'm currently in Dubai to deliver some training in clinical study design to a group of medical advisers from a pharmaceutical company. I'd heard that Dubai is a fascinating place and I've never been here before, so I arranged my schedule to give myself a little time to have a look around.

Average age of first-time house buyers

One of my favourite radio programmes is More or Less, presented by the excellent Tim Harford. If you are even remotely interested in statistics, then you should listen to it. It does a splendid job of unpicking some of the dodgy numbers we hear in the news.

London riots

London is under attack. Last night’s scenes of violence and destruction are worse than anything I remember in my lifetime. What I think was most scary was that the police were simply overwhelmed, and did not have the resources to deal with the rampant criminality.

I got to see some of this first hand. I happened to be in Colliers Wood yesterday evening. One shop had been set on fire, and other shops had had windows smashed and were being looted. The police were present, but were not able to intervene in the looting. I saw police in riot gear guarding a petrol station. They had presumably taken the (no doubt very wise) decision that preventing a petrol station being set on fire was the most important use of their limited resources.

History of medicine walking tour

In the 12 years or so that I have been a member of EMWA, I have travelled all over Europe attending their conferences. At most conferences, the social programme includes a walking tour of the city. It's always a popular event, and is a great way to see something of the conference's host city (sometimes the only time you get to see any of the city at all).

Evidence based footcare part 2

As an update to my earlier post about some foot cream that was supposed to stop me getting blisters when training for and running in the Brighton Marathon, I now have the results.

I used the cream on my left foot, but not on my right, for about 3 weeks before the race.

Evidence based footcare

I'm training for a marathon at the moment (and it's in aid of Cancer Research UK, which is an excellent cause, so please sponsor me here), and all the running has given me some nasty blisters on my feet.

So I went to see a podiatrist yesterday to try to make sure that the blisters are under control in time for the big day. She put a dressing on which seemed to make my blisters pain free on my run this morning, which is a good start.

Bexhill half marathon

I'm delighted to report that I ran my first ever half marathon yesterday, namely the Bexhill Poppy Half Marathon. The weather was rather unpleasant, but at least the rain had eased off by the time the race started and we avoided the heavy downpours of earlier in the day. I wasn't sure what time to expect, but given that I've done a couple of 10 mile races earlier this year with a time of just over 1 h 40 min, I thought I'd probably complete the half marathon in somewhere around 2 h 10 min to 2 h 15 min.

Ikea

In my previous post "Everything is crap" I promised to write more about Ikea once the legal stuff was all over. Well, it is, so here goes.

Almost exactly a year ago, we had some furniture delivered from Ikea. One of the delivery men dropped the furniture on the hearth of our almost brand new and expensive limestone fireplace, and broke it. When we pointed out the damage, the other delivery man then became quite rude and abusive, denying all responsibility and shouting a lot.

Everything is crap

I don't think I'm paranoid, but sometimes I feel everyone really is out to get me. Why is it so hard to get products and services that just work and do what they are supposed to do? Some examples:

Ikea. I won't say any more for now about my own recent experience while it's still with the lawyers, but watch this space for all the details in due course. I'm sure you know what they're like anyway.

How not to do customer service

When I set up Dianthus Medical 10 years ago, I have to confess that the idea of setting up a business was a little scary. One of the things that gave me the courage to go ahead anyway was the observation that so many companies seemed to be incredibly badly run, and yet still survived, so how hard could it be?