🧵 This week is Haemochromatosis Awareness Week, and I’d like to tell you a bit about this surprisingly common genetic condition and why we should be aware of it. First, please watch this quick film (It has me being messy with my blood!)/1
@IronOverloadUK Genetic Haemochromatosis, commonly known as ‘Iron Overload’, is a condition where the body retains too much Iron. This can produce varied symptoms and lead to serious problems. So it’s important to catch it early. /2

Thread. The following is the testimony of Lord Amulree, a physician, recorded during a landmark debate in the UK House of Lords in November 1965 on the Abortion Bill to enable safe clinical procedure, which eventually became law in England and Wales in 1967: “I was talking to a young man, who some years ago worked with me, and who is now working as the registrar in the obstetric hospital of one of our big towns in the North,and he told me that about every five or six weeks...

That image. Of a killer able to use all the tools of the power the state had granted him to submit an innocent woman to such horror. A killer with previous.... Who am I, if I simply shrug my male shoulders, and accept that this monstrosity is merely some additional hazard to be added to the long list of women's potential horrors?

Flesh, blood, and the kindness of brilliant strangers. A thread.
Peeps who follow me might know that I’ve written a book on the history of my family, told through the medical maladies they suffered (see biog for link). My mum played a major part in that medical saga. /1 Well, today her medical saga continued. Today my elderly mum received the Pfizer vaccine. She is one of the first humans in history involved in this brand new chapter of medical science – the recipient of mRNA technology. /2

Meanness is an insidious thing. I'm old enough to have watched it curdle various people's personalities - their disappointments, envies and spites slowly rising to engult their previous disposition, as life fails to live up to their own lofty expectations. /1 And fear, too. That plays a part. Fear of decline - of age - loss of control, status or importance. But meanness is a barnacle. Once it's got a grip of you, you never get it off that hull you think of as your virtuous nature. You become encrusted by your fears as malice. /2

A word about chaos and poverty. My mum was a nursery school teacher working, particularly in her earlier years, in a very deprived area of the city. Chaos was, indeed, a major factor in the lives of these defenceless infants... because chaos is that great and terrible side-effect of need that no glib spouting of recipes or elite theories of dependence ever really encapsulates. My mother worked hard with these children to provide stability. A safe haven. Comfort. Basic security....

The constant lying in public life eventually erodes not only trust in those who do it, but any trust in the value of truth itself. This is a problem, because we all need truth at crucial points in our lives. In exams. In the courts. In the ballot box. In hospital. Don't let others steal the truth from you and sell their version of it back to you. Protect it for your family, for your community, for yourself. Don't let the cynical lie that 'everybody lies' blind you to the fact that many don't.

A thread about A Levels.
I was once told a story by someone who’d previously worked as a City exchange trader. He described his trading floor in the heady, post-Big-Bang days. /1 The sharp-suited working-class boys on the front line phones, he said, had a contemptuous nickname for the clueless scions of good schools and good families who invariably held the management positions above them... /2

Oh no. We mustn’t be kind. Never. We must never soften. We must never drop our emotional guard. We must never speak of love, or cry warm tears, or betray a whiff of sentiment. This is heresy. /1 Only darkness is real. Only darkness is cool. It’s more important to be whip-smart than happy. It’s more important to be cynical than to belong. It’s better to be hateful than to risk caring. /2

A long, long time ago, I took part in a TV drama about the Russian mafia. It filmed in St Petersburg, and was at a time when the naivety of Glasnost had not yet fully transformed into the unbound cynicism of financial oligarchy. /1 The experience seared me. The people grasping power there were utterly ruthless - yet so obscenely wealthy, that no powerful opponents in their country could resist being bought off, and thus corrupted in turn. Their nation was becoming a perfect base for global domination./2

I'm the age to have known plenty of the actual 'war generation' in my life. They were my parents - my aunts and uncles - even political leaders. The thing that always came across was the damage of it all. The hard cost of the good things that followed. /1 Peace was a gift to those who came after. Youth culture, free health, white technological heat. No crawling from rubble, like my own mother. No bleeding out on a French beach, like my father. The luxury of consumer distractions, and a pension at the end of it. /2

Dad's D-Day. 5th June. The bloody weather.
On this day, 75 years ago, he embarked at Southampton docks for Normandy. The docks were a mass of different shipsand craft, and one vast, swarming crowd of servicemen. /1 Unknown to him then was the fact that his uncle had departed from these same docks 32 years before, as a merchant seaman. Another journey with an interesting conclusion. The Titanic. But dad knew exactly where his own iceberg was located. /2

Terrorism: the essentials.
1. If there is someone with a weapon trying to kill innocent people in a public place, then that's a terrorist. No other qualification is required. No need to check for race, religion, or cute childhood photos. Just hunt them down and lock them up. /1 2. This terrorist is a murderous sociopath who has made deadly decisions that endanger the lives of innocent people. They have made specific choices. The motivations for these choices are never the responsibility of other law abiding peoples, whatever their race or religion. /2

I watched an American voter on television news last night - elderly, respectable, likely a churchgoer - expressing the view that Trump was indeed a bad person, but delivered everything she personally wanted. Therefore he had her complete and continuing support. /1 This view centred around the common assumption that ‘they’re all as bad as each other’, and so personal policy fulfilment was the only criterion by which to judge a politician. /2

THREAD: When I see a Burqa, I never think of a letterbox, or a bank robber. I think of a young woman. Standing on a beach in South Wales. Alone. Far from home. Thinking. Feeling. /1 To explain. Some years ago, I was asked to deliver a week of talks on communication skills to a financial company in the Middle East. /2

On the issue of ignorance and feelings in an age of opinion: I grew up working class. Surrounding me were men and women who, though not formally educated, placed huge value on the acquisition of knowledge as a mark of self-respect. Our local library flourished. /1 I can see one such man in my mind's eye now. A pub quiz champion. A self-taught expert on Mahler. A drinker who could recite every line of Shakespeare.. What marked these people wasn't snobbery, but the idea that to be in ignorance was, while not wrong, worth correcting. /2

A really heartbreaking thing about this disastrous Brexit process is the bleeding away of our international credibility. Britain, for all of our domestic debates, was a respected agent in international affairs - pragmatic and grown-up. /1 Our reputation was decades in the making - but is being shattered in a matter of a couple of years. No matter what one's opinion on leaving the EU, there were always wider imperatives about the trust that could be placed on us as a diplomatic and trading nation /2