Tristan Paul Coxon – April 5th 2015

Trigger Warning: this post contains information and pictures relating to the neonatal death of our son Tristan; If you are pregnant or any of these issues are a trigger for you please think carefully before continuing.

For Lot’s Wife

This is a story.

It begins: Listen! Paul Coxon has become unstuck in time

And it ends: Mummy and Daddy love you Tristan.

Listen! Paul Coxon has become unstuck in time.

It is said that Hassan al-Sabbāh (1050s-1124) trained his fearsome Ḥashshāshīn (Assassins) from his mountain stronghold of Alamut (now in North-West Iran) by first showing them paradise on Earth through a heady mix of strong Hashish and even stronger sweet wines. Once his devotees had grown a taste for this paradise, Al-Sabbāh withdraw the wine and the dope promising access would be returned if they carried out some small tasks for him. These small tasks usually involved infiltration, sedition or murder of some description, which his devotees jumped at the chance to carry out; thus is the allure of paradise. I have seen paradise, held him in my arms and lost it again almost as quickly. For the first time I understand its allure and would do anything to get it back.

“So how did you get on? How is fatherhood treating you?” My dentist asked in all innocence. She didn’t know, she couldn’t know, but it’s too late. I’m crying uncontrollably, anguished sobs rippling my body, sysmic shocks through jelly as I try to gasp my story before I slip beneath the weight of memory and drift…

As I write this, I am trembling uncontrollably, I have lost count of the times I’ve had to stop, eyes clouded with tears to compose myself before continuing. I need to finish this story, I need to set it free into the world where it will stay. This is not something I can keep inside, I am afraid of the consequences if I do. Sometimes the fire burns white hot, I can’t move, think and barely breath. I fear my core will begin creating iron in ever increasing quantities, then other heavy elements…Yeat’s Falcon in the widening gyre: ‘things fall apart their centres cannot hold’…and I will collapse in onto myself and then, fractions of a second later, explode. Supernovae, my fire will consume the world and I will be no more. So, this is a pressure release, painful as it is to write, this is therapy, strange and clumsy, but therapeutic.

For Kurt Vonnegut Jr, it was witnessing the fire bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war during the dying days of World War Two that would temporarily sever his connection with time and which would form the basis of his cult classic novella, Slaughterhouse Five. I didn’t witness the collective, largely civilian, population of Dresden being bombed mercilessly by U.S. Warplanes, or walked with the wounded and dying through the remains of a huge city levelled in a few nights of concentrated malice.

No, my Dresden was a much quieter affair, though perhaps no more or less horrific. And it’s that easy, blink my eyes for too long and it’s the 6th April, a nurse with a kind smile advises me, “make sure you take lots of pictures.”

I didn’t hear her at first and so she prompted again. Nesting in the incubator before me, at the centre of a tangle of wires and tubes I am looking at my son for the first time:

This is Tristan. Isn’t he beautiful? I feel so proud that he is our son; even now my heart swells with happiness showing him off to you, my friends, though that happiness is followed quickly by deep horror and a sadness that regularly sweeps over me. It is brutal, it takes no prisoners, the Teller in a bank, my dentist, the little boy who tells me my superman trainers are ‘soooo cool’ I have cried at them all.

The neonatal consultant explains that our son is in a protective hypothermic state and what all His wires and tubes are doing. He shows me Tristan’s brain activity, says the next hours will be crucial if he is to make any sort of recovery. Starved of oxygen for close to 20 minutes, he doesn’t have to tell me how low the odds would be of a full recovery.

It’s 1:30am on Sunday 5th April and I have never been so frightened in my entire life. My beautiful wife, Lara, is fighting for her life in a theatre somewhere within the bowels of Coventry Hospital having suffered huge internal bleeding during the final stages of labour, no one is able to tell me this though, everyone who might be able to tell me this is busy with the practicality of saving Her life. I must wait another 5 hours before I find out she is stable and being moved to intensive care.

I spend the time leaning over Tristan’s incubator telling him all the things that I had waited 9 months to say. Swinging between giddy excitement and poorly stifled tears, I gabbled near stream of consciousness, “Your name is Tristan and I’m your Daddy…You need to get strong because when Mummy wakes up she is going to be so excited to meet you…your Granddad is here too to meet you…Until you and Mummy are strong Daddy is here and I’ll be your sword, I’ll be your armour”

Sometimes I would fall silent, simply put my index finger in the centre of his tiny open palm and will for any increase in pressure that would indicate a voluntary response on his part. There is nothing.

I sing to him, quietly and self consciously at first but eventually louder, all the songs my parents sang to me as a child, the songs I loved. I apologised for being tone deaf and told him that if he wanted me to stop he need only wake up and stop me. But there was nothing.

Realising time was passing us by, I watched his brain activity displayed on the monitor above his incubator and willed it to be more than it was. After 4 hours, it was clear that the little hope that entered the neonatal care unit with Tristan had slipped away, there would be no recovery now. It’s 5am and suddenly I know our baby will die and fear my wife will too.

I find myself wondering, If by some miracle she is okay, how do I tell her about Tristan? What if he doesn’t make it long enough to meet her? I am shaking, everything is spinning, I duck out of the neonatal care unit and into the family room, where, sat on the floor in the small gap between a sofa and chest of drawers I break down.

It is here that he finds me, the head of surgery who has been overseeing Lara’s surgery. His name is Mr Kaey and he is my hero. He gives me the first good news that I have had and even that stretches the very definition of good news to near breaking point. He explains in a voice that is tinged with emotion I am seldom used to hearing from medical professionals that my wife had to be cut extensively in order to find the source of her bleeding.

He tells me that having explored most of her internal organs the bleed was located and stopped. He tells me in the process she had received close to 7 litres of transfused blood, a near complete ‘oil change’. He assures me she should make a full recovery but that recovery would be slow. He said he was so sorry that this had happened and how incredibly rare it was (less than 200 cases recorded in medical literature). I thanked him for saving her life, I thank him every day and will continue to thank him until my last days.

After Mr Kaey had gone I went back to the neonatal unit and told Tristan the good news. I told him Mummy was going to be okay and would want to see him as soon as she was awake.

It would be another hour or so before Lara would wake up from the large dose of anaesthetic she had received. I remember seeing her for the first time in Intensive Care, a large tube down her throat attached to almost as many tubes and wires as Tristan and looking as pale and frail as anyone I have seen. There is nothing that can frighten me now, no horror worse than those moments before Lara opened her eyes.

Even coming round from the anaesthetic and unable to talk from the tube still helping her breath, Lara raised her arms above the bed as if cradling an invisible baby and her eyes pleaded with me for answers. I told her Tristan was very poorly but that she would be able to see him soon.

A few hours later Lara would be moved from intensive care to the maternity ward where she could be close to Tristan and kept under observation every hour. I had a bed next to hers and it is here I would spend the best part of the next week.

With Lara awake, I allowed my hope to be renewed. I reasoned that in actual fact miracles do happen from time-to-time: people many years in comatose states wake up, people starved of oxygen in excess of 10 minutes sometimes make full recoveries. We told each other that if we gave him enough time perhaps we would allow some germ of a miracle to begin to grow and Tristan would be okay.

The wonderful staff at the University Hospital Coventry ensured that we could see Tristan as much as we wanted. This was no mean feat in itself as each visit meant moving Lara, who was still not able to walk, in her hospital bed along with her numerous drips, sensors and machinery to the neonatal ward where Tristan was. This is how the next few days would pan out, back-and-forth between maternity and the neonatal ward, in between times we rested. We took lots of pictures during our visits, some of these are below:

We didn’t cry too much, I seem to remember, numbness was more the order of those first few days, though we’ve certainly made up for it since. Visitors came and went, for beautiful and precious moments we were normal parents, proud as punch as we show off our new born son to excited family and friends. It seems slightly surreal looking back, like a choreographed act of normality with tragedy, ever-present, just beneath the surface. I kept thinking that if this continued demonstration of love and togetherness from all our friends wasn’t enough to kick start the miracle that we so needed then nothing would be. Tristan’s condition did not change.

It’s Tuesday 7th April 2015 and early in the morning. I pay Tristan a visit in the neonatal ward and propped in front of his incubator is a picture of his big feet with the caption: ‘Even the smallest footprints have the power to leave everlasting imprints on this earth.” It is perfect and it lifts my spirits. I do not know it yet but today I will need all the strength I can get:

In the night, Lara had taken a turn for the worst. If you move someone’s bowel it will often freeze causing dangerous amounts of bile to build up leading to any number of serious complications. They had to insert a tube down Lara’s throat and into her bowel in order to drain it, this would be the start of my favourite story from the whole ordeal:

To say Lara was unhappy about having the tube down her throat would be an understatement, she complained about being uncomfortable and feeling worse-off as a result. The surgeons who had inserted the tube insisted that it was a necessity that couldn’t be removed until it has done its job. When they had left, I warned the nurse observing Lara that if left alone that tube was going to get pulled out. Seeing an opportunity while an X-ray on her bowels was being performed – which incidentally revealed that the tube had become twisted against the bowel wall – and just as I said she would, Lara removed the tube herself. I confess I am proud of her for that, I’ll-advised and reckless as it was, it makes me smile thinking about it.

The surgeons returned and agreed to not reinsert the tube at that time but advised that it would need to be put back in sooner or later if Lara was to get better. “We’ll see.” Was all my she said to that and the same day we would overhear the surgeons puzzling over how Lara was making leaps and bounds towards recovery without them reinserting the tube into her bowel, the one thing they had been certain would not happen. I am reminded there is a lot to be said for will-power, determination and sheer bloody-mindedness, three things that my beautiful wife has in endless supply.

As Lara was making giant leaps towards a recovery, Tristan had taken a turn for the worst. We had been advised already that the little hope our Son had was gone and we needed to give serious thought to turning off his ventilator and allowing him to die. Tuesday morning, we were still not ready to make that call, but Tristan made it for us when the tube that was providing oxygen to his lungs had become dislodged. We were advised that the tube could be reinserted but that the procedure would be invasive.

Together, we made the decision that we must let our beautiful son go and not have his breathing tube reinserted. Though I know it was a humane, medically and ethically sound decision to make at that point I feel the crushing weight of it on me every day. We definitely did the right thing, it is not that I have doubt of that, it’s just sometimes the right thing really sucks.

For the first time Tristan would be brought to us free of wires and medical technology and we would do the things that we had craved for days, the hallmarks of parental normality. We got to give him a bath, change his nappy and dress him in some of the beautiful clothes that we had got for him to wear:

At about 5:30pm on Tuesday 7th of April Tristan’s heart had stopped and our son died, peacefully in our arms. He would stay with us for the remainder of the day with the great support of hospital staff and the next morning we would give our consent for his body to be moved to the chapel of rest.

I remember putting our son in bed next to his Mummy while I went to the toilet and on coming back was presented with the below scene:

I don’t think I’ll ever take a better picture than this, it was like capturing the exact moment a star turns supernova. Everything exists in duality, it is at once the most beautiful and most deeply horrific thing that I have ever seen. Life and death as they exist, on a knife edge, and it is here that we walk.

Over the next few days, Lara would continue to make huge steps towards recovery, surprising all the medical staff who would visit her. On Thursday 9th April we would be moved to one of the hospitals lovely family rooms and the next day we would have to attend the hospitals registration office where we would register Tristan’s birth and death at the same time.

Though purely administrative, signing those certificates would be one of the most painful experiences that we would endure. Having things spelled out on official paper makes them seem so much more real and final. The same day we registered Tristan’s life and death, Lara would be discharged from hospital and we would return home to a nursery that was waiting expectantly for our son. I don’t have adequate words to explain the sadness of an empty nursery without a child to fill it, but you get used to it. I say that a lot: you get used to it. Nothing is anywhere near the things we expected when Lara went into labour, this is not normal but a new type of normal that you get used to because there are no other options.

We arranged and held a funeral for Tristan on 24th April, which was attended by all our friends and family. I wrote the below poem which I was able to read on the day:

You will be loved

Sweet darling boy, our beautiful Son,
You will never get to see the wonderful world that we have built for you
And Mummy and Daddy, their hearts are broken
That your first words will forever go unspoken
That your first steps will never tentatively be taken
But you will be loved little baby Tristan, you will be loved.

We’ll never get to teach you to tie shoe-laces
Never take you to the dentist who will never say you need braces.
But you will be loved, you will be loved.

You will never know the simple pleasure
Of trailing a hand in still water at leisure
Watching the ripples as they expand
Though your life was short, your ripple travels far
I look up, watch for our newest star
And you are loved.

– End –

Since then, we have been supported by so many people, I’ll be forever grateful to those who have lent us their time, shoulders and ears when we have needed them, I’ll be writing more on this later.

it’s not been easy. There have been days where simply getting out of bed has seemed like climbing a mountain, but we’ve got up and faced each new day together. I am in awe of how well Lara has dealt with everything the universe has thrown at us over the past few months, her strength and courage is inspirational.

It’s been difficult watching friends, who were pregnant around the same time as Lara, give birth to perfectly healthy children while all we have is a teddy bear that contains our son’s ashes and a deep, enduring, pain. I don’t begrudge them their happiness, easy as it would be to succumb to such base emotions, but their joy at the wonder of new life throws stark relief on our sorrow.

So here we are, it’s Monday 27th July and today I begin a phased return to work after a 4 month absence. I am looking forward to it, slowly we are allowing normality and routine to root us back into time. It is painful and at times brutal but life must go on.

Those of you who know me will know that I have an interest in coincidence and synchronicity, so how’s this: Tristan was born on the same date as my Brother’s son, Josh (5th April) and died on the same day as my Mum (7th April).

Kurt Vonnegut Jr ended the brilliant introduction to Slaughterhouse 5 with the following half-apology:

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore. I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.

I’ve always liked that and it sums up how I feel about this post. I promise, dearest reader, that the next one will be more fun. All that remains to be said is:

Mummy and Daddy love you Tristan.

Give Blood

Lara received a lot of donated blood and Tristan was also treated with blood products to help his blood clot. The UK blood service are always crying out for doners, find out more about giving blood here: Giving Blood in the UK

Because the Drugs (Legislation) Don’t Work

I still sometimes wake in cold sweats. I am there again and it is happening.

Late at night, toally unprovoked, the first attack from behind, knocks me to the floor. A large group, all female, all wasted on alcohol and desperate for destruction. I remember it, all too vividly, I will never forget. They probably were not bad women on the whole, it’s all too easy to demonise our attackers, but they were deeply under the influence of alcohol and they felt invincible. I did not (could not?) fight back. They left their mark…

I’m not the only one, take a look at this picture. These injuries:

All these injuries were caused by people under the heavy influence of alcohol. Let’s put an end to this! Let’s make alcohol illegal. It’s massively addictive, contributes to public disturbances and plagues poorer communities. It’s time that stops…

At this point a large proportion of my readers, I hope, are wondering what’s going on. Logic should have kicked in. I’m deliberately using emotion and shocking images to manipulate your thinking and bring it round to mine. It’s a very simple trick and it is easily combatted with critical reasoning: Although alcoholism is a problem in the UK (and worldwide), on the whole, people have a sensible relationship with alcohol. Alcohol did and does cause the things I described, but you should not legislate based on emotion and isolated incidents. That would be really stupid, right? Prohibition of things that are readily available in society is always ineffectual and destined to fail. Right?

Here’s a picture of Leah Betts:

In 1995, this picture outraged the nation. It prompted a sit-down with my parents to warn me about THOSE Drugs. For many in the anti-drugs lobby in the UK, Leah’s picture is enough to vindicate their point that all drugs are bad and all drug use ends in the death of the user.

A single picture proves nothing. This picture of Leah Betts proves nothing, other than life is perilously fragile and the tragic death of a young girl is A Tragedy. It is worth noting that despite common perceptions that Leah died from taking Ecstasy, in fact her death was caused by drinking too much water, which diluted her bloodstream. But, even if she had died from an Ecstasy tablet, you can’t (and shouldn’t) legislate based on this. We should expect and demand evidence-based practice and pictures of dead girls, while shocking and terribly sad, are no aid to critical reasoning. It’s a very simple trick. It’s okay to talk about it, here’s why…

In 2009, the Transform Drugs Policy Foundation calculated/estimated/made-up, the cost of UK enforcement of drugs legislation to £16 Billion. We are paying for that. You, Me and Everyone else in the UK, we’re all paying for that. Part of paying for something is you get to have a voice in how that money is spent.  I can think of a lot better uses for that money and we need more than shock tactics and propaganda if we are to have a sensible, adult discussion on legislation that costs our country vast sums of money to enforce every year.

I’m not going to labour the point on why the, so-called, War on Drugs is dumb, there are far more interesting and educated folk who’ve done that better than I ever could (see further reading), but to summarise:

• Most of the problems with illegal drugs stem from their illegality not individual substances;
• In about 60 years of activity, the anti-drugs lobby and enforcement activity worldwide has summarily failed to reduce the number of users and the availability of drugs in society;
• While Alcohol and Nicotine remain legal, any moral argument based on overall public harm is at best mis-guided and, at worst, deceiptful and morally bereft;
• Drugs legislation often criminalises those who otherwise lead totally moral and law-abiding lifestyles; and
• At a time of economic decline the War on Drugs is costing us all a small fortune and achieving nothing.

…But I’m more concerned about one of the by-products of this mis-guided War. Unless we learn from history, it repeats, cliched and entirely true; prohibition does not work. There is always a response.

Over the last few years there has been an alarming rise in the variety and widespread availability of totally legal ‘Research Chemicals’, often known as Legal Highs. These highs come in a variety of shapes and sizes: pills, powders, smokes; all attractively packaged and branded with names such as Herbal Haze (smoke), black mamba (smoke), Columbiana (powder) all totally unregulated available on the UK highstreet and over the internet. What is more, I am reliably informed, many of these Research Chemicals are as strong and, in many cases, stronger than illegal alternatives. Let me say again: no one is regulating this absolutely vast industry that must be worth millions every year.

I am also reliably informed that there are massive inconsistancies between products, even those branded the same way, and I have heard from numerous friends that this has lead them to have quite negative, unpleasant and frightening experiences using such substances. One friend reported smoking a substance, branded as anhilation, which produced a near psychosis, short term loss of some muscle control and days of detachment afterwards. I have a genuine concern that it is a matter of time before people start dying as a result of these substances. But…

Further prohibition is not the answer. It can’t be. Prohibition is the root cause at the heart of the market for research chemicals. Prohibition is no longer an adequate response to the problem. If the government bans one batch of chemicals, within a matter of days a new batch will appear and there is no forseeable end to that. The war on drugs has ultimately created the problem that it was designed to tackle.

We need a serious discussion about drugs legislation in the UK (and worldwide), we need evidence-based legislative practice, logic and less fear. It’s another cliche, but sometimes it’s better the devil you know and we have had many decades to scientifically study substances like cocaine Sulphate, THC and MDMA, so we know their effects on the human body. This is important: we know, quite accurately, their relative levels of harm to society. We know precious little, often nothing at all, about these research chemicals. The clue is in the name.

I believe, that we need to spend more money on dealing with the problems of addiction and stop spending any money on fighting a war that was lost sometime around 1960. Alternatively, we can continue with the cycles of restriction, control and prohibition towards emerging substances; we can continue pushing users towards newer and increasingly dangerous substances, the long term effects of which we can only begin to guess at. If we do this and maintain the status quo, it is my belief that people will start dying. As a society, it’s not too late, we can prevent that happening.

We live in an age requiring that we step out from beneath the fear around drugs thrust on us all by the national media and recognise that legalisation, for a huge swathe of reasons, is the right, the moral and the only option for addressing this hugely important social issue.

Please Note

Writing a post in favour of the decriminalisation of drugs is not the same as advocating the use of drugs. Please bear that in mind, I really don’t care either way whether you do or don’t use drugs (past/present/future). If you are going to read this and suggest that I am advocating drug use, then you’re an idiot.

Also, if you’re going to tell me about your brother/auntie/uncle/cousin who got addicted to Heroin/Cocaine/Crystal Meth and try and use that as the basis for a counter-argument, you will have already failed. So, let me save you the time.

And finally, Something to think about

There are many interesting books (and many not-so) on the history of drugs. Amongst my favourites is The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge by Cultural Anthropologist Jeremy Narby. Narby makes the controversial suggestion that human intelligence and language, The very building blocks of the first human societies, arose from the ritual use of hallucinogenic plants and roots. He makes a fascinating case and it is well worth a read.

Few people have ever summed up the war on drugs better than the genius that is Bill Hicks:

Further Reading

Transform Drugs Policy Foundation: Alternative world Drugs Report

Professor David Nutt – Evidence not Exaggeration Blog

Moron Watch: Category – War on Drugs

Esquire: Legalize Everything

Huffington Post: To win the War on Drugs follow the states

So, you know the drill, if you don’t like these thought, stick around, I have plenty of others.

My Lasting Memory of the #Olympic Opening Ceremony

It won’t be Danny Boyles amazing spectacle charting British history or Daniel Craig’s James Bond collecting the Queen or Rowan Atkinson doing Chariots of Fire; not even the replica of Glastonbury Tor being used to hold the flags that I’ll remember most about the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics.

No all of this will fade in time,, but there is one piece of footage that I fear will not fade. OIt’s a tiny piece of footage compared to the whole spectacle of the opening ceremony, but it made me cry my eyes out:

Please watch the above video of Muhammad Ali. I need your help…

I need to know whether you think the man in that footage is in control of his faculties, ie is he aware of himself and his environment? This is important

Having watched the video numerous times myself and, while no expert, I’m not entirely convinced Muhammad Ali would be declared mentally competent to make decisions for himself.

I sincerely hope that my eyes deceive me, my gut is wrong and Ali is still sound enough of mind to make decisions for himself. I sincerely hope that he used his intact mental capacity to choose to attend the Olympics opening…the alternative to this would be horrific.

The only real alternative would be: Muhammad Ali is no longer capable of making decisions for himself and someone holds a Power of Attourney agreement to make decisions on his behalf. If this was the case, it’s hard to argue that accepting an invitation to take part in the Olympic opening ceremony on behalf of a man in the late stages of Parkinson’s Disease, would ever be deemed in the best interests of that individual. Unless I’m missing something, this would be exploitative, both morally and ethically bereft.

Based solely on appearances it seems to me that these are reasonable questions to be asking. It’s not about it being Muhammad Ali, it’s about a vulnerable man of 70 with advanced stage Parkinson’s and whether his interests are being correctly safeguarded and his dignity maintained.

Luckily there has at least been one Journalist who seems to have met Ali a few days before the opening ceremony.That journalist is Paul Hayward, Chief Sports Editor for The Telegraph His piece uses this video as proof of the point that ‘Muhammad Ali’s electrifying aura whips up an Olympic frenzy at awards ceremony’. You must draw your own conclusions on whether the footage demonstrates that.

Even Hayward admits in the article that: ‘A hand lifted to acknowledge the adulation of a London crowd was Muhammad Ali’s only physical contribution,’ Telegraph Source.

I have more questions than answers.

Message to #Olympic Nations and World

I have yet to remember the name of the country, but I recall a BBC commentator say that a small country had halted it’s raging civil war for 16 days while the games are played out. There is something surreal about pausing a war. What a wonderfully curious species we are, but it got me thinking…

You remember that moment when representatives from pretty much every country on our entire planet were standing together and no one got stabbed, blown up, raped or tortured?

Yeah, it needs to be like that from now on.

Those Guns, Bombs and other kill kill death things you’ve so ingeniously created to kill enemies real, perceived or otherwise, you don’t need them. They’re Ours now. That war your currently enjoying, sorry to give ending away but here it is: loads of people die, infrastructures get fucked and things are bad. Eventually the right people realise that things were better before all the death and stuff. So it’s quite simple, unless yours is definitely the first war that will solve things that talking wouldn’t, then stop. Stop now, your guns have a better use.

Your armouries are made of metal, metal is finite. As you no longer need to blow the fuck out of each other, then we need metal, lots of it and cooperation. We’re going to sort this stuff out, all of it and build a spaceship together.

Or not

It is our choice, but the alternative to our crazy spaceship is that we’ll continue to destroy each other and the environment. We will fail as a species and you will die here.

That Friday Follow Thing: Social Care

For those not familiar Friday Follow (#ff) is a Twitter convention whereby on a Friday you recommend people to follow. This is considered, a fantastic way to make new connections via a trusted recommendation or one giant internet circle jerk where bored idiots stroke their egos, depending on your side of the argument.

Me?

I do it occasionally and it does end up taking a considerable amount of time up but, by the same account, I do follow a lot of people who I learn from on a daily basis. My preference is that if you’re going to do it then rather than just tweeting #ff and a list long list of names,  tweet a single username and the reason that you are recommending them, have to say I have personally founded quite a few new people to follow by such recommendations. Anyway enough of my personal Twitter etiquette, I will be doing posts like this from time-to-time on a Friday instead of doing it on Twitter, I’ll be doing the recommendations based on themes and today’s theme is Social Care. Even though our current Government seem to have forgotten about Social Care with the latest delay to the long awaiting and much needed White Paper, time and change wait for no one. Twitter is an exciting place to be for Social Care content at the moment, lots of connections are starting to form, debates are being had about the big issues affecting the practice and management of Social Care from people working in Local Authorities, Charities and from private sector providers of care. Without exception, all the social care Tweeters that I have met have been linked by desire to engage and that’s exciting for me, people are starting to share ideas and best practice in an open environment like Twitter and that can only be good for both the profession as a whole and to the public perception of it.

Call to Arms: Do You work in Health or Social Care?

We need you. We may need you to lead us, if you’re willing and your vision is strong enough, but we certainly need you. You might have the idea that makes it all work, we might have some ideas that work for you. I really want to see a lot more Social Care and Health tweeters and bloggers over the coming years, there’s a reason for this. Eddie Izzard does a sketch about bee-keepers:

You guys working front line Health and Social Care, you’re the bee keepers. I’ve met very few people working in Health and Social Care who told me they were ‘just doing a job’ or ‘just doing it for the money’ the thing that I have noticed is they share a genuine passion for helping people by offering the best services that they are able and that, in itself, is no easy task. So come on guys, let’s see you on Twitter, let’s hear your thoughts. We do not have to wait for a Government that has seemingly forgotten about us, we’re here, we’re talking; there is not a single movement in the history of civilisation that hasn’t started this way. Anyway, if you want to find the most interesting content on Twitter on UK Social Care here are the people I recommend you follow.

This list is by no means exhaustive, I have chosen the people I regard as the best curators of content, through these people you will find a lot more people to follow and engage with.

Shirley Ayres (@Shirley Ayres) – Shirley is a true leader and a bit of a heretic at times and quite right too, heretics have more fun! Shirley is responsible for well over half of the interesting content I read on Twitter around Social Care and Health, her skill at curating content and asking the right and difficult questions is legendary. I follow Shirley closely, she is always engaged in fascinating discussions on a variety of topics and I learn a lot. You should read her superb blog on Connecting Social Care and Social Media.

I have a list of people I intend to go out of my way to meet and learn from, Shirley is on there, we keep missing each other, but we’ll get there soon.

Ermintrude2 – Anonymous Blogger Ermintrude2 is another superb creator and curator of thought provoking content around Social Care. She is someone I would hold up as a superb ambassador for the profession, always sharing best practice and experience and always eager to engage in important discussions. Ermintrude is the antidote to the often skewed picture of  Social Care that is in the media, we need more people like her! She is involved in The Not So Big Society Blog, which I highly recommend.

GndSocialCare – Sometimes working in Social Care you’d be forgiven for thinking the national media an enemy. Unfortunately bad news sells more papers than good news, so a lot of the stories that end up running about Social Care are about the times it goes wrong or we get it wrong. The Guardian are on a wonderful mission to present a bit more balanced perspective on Social Care issues and their content just gets better and better. Check out the Guardian Social Care Network.

Claudia Megele – Her Twitter Profile States: There is little I’m not curious about & even less I’m not interested in… and that about sums up the content she creates and curates, always fascinating. Claudia is a Senior Lecturer, MSc Module Leader, Author and Researcher.

LearningSHaCK – This account is close to my heart as run  by friends and colleagues in the Learning and Development Service at Warwickshire, I helped them to get started on Twitter and am pleased to say they have become fantastic curators and creators of content.

And last, but no means least, a recent one, but immediately brilliant:

WhoCaresWalsall – Provides information about care services in Walsall and began with the live-tweeting of the morning in the life of Sheila who cares for her husband Ron who has Vascular Dementia. You can read the full story and you should, it was a superb piece of storytelling in real time and perfectly highlighted a lot of the issues of caring for someone who has dementia and also someone living with dementia. On every level I am in awe and certainly one to watch; there don’t have to be flashy unicorns, it just needs to be real and this is. Check out the blog and huge Kudos to Tina and Becky from Walsall Council for Tweeting such a powerful story. Also credit to Dan Slee for being awesome.

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