‘I’m making them palliative, please can you come and see them’. I prefer to think of myself as the firefighter and not the arsonist- that is to say as a physician of the palliative variety I have yet to make an individual ‘palliative’. When their palliative disease necessitates my involvement I do my best to help them, mine is not the fire to light but I am good with a salve.

We have a lifetime to prepare for our dying and yet it seems that for most of us we still arrive ill-prepared.

Cleverness is a very human attribute. When we talk about animals being clever we don’t really mean that they are smart we mean that they are showing an ability to learn or to solve a very simple problem. The person devising the problem, the experiment and the inevitable scientific paper, they are being clever. The proverbial mouse in the maze just wants his cheese, ephemeral dreams of academic luminary praise are not for the mouse.

It’s a travesty!’, a colleague said to me- ‘look at these scans’. I looked and agreed; those lungs resembled a Jackson Pollock painting with wild streaks of grey scale throughout. ‘This person requires a transplant’. Two hours later I was told that the patient in question was going to die and would I mind seeing them?