Are we supposed to be enjoying ourselves? Work can be tedious, boring, irritating and frustrating but sometimes one has a pretty good day when a mixed agenda of interests inside and outside of the Lords is highly enjoyable. Yesterday I started the day working on a student appeal against termination of registration at St George’s, University of London. As Chair of Council I have a very circumscribed limited role in the appeal, to request a final extra review or not,  but the work takes careful scrutiny of the case documents and I am horribly aware that a negative decision can be heartbreaking for the  individual. I always have in mind how I would feel.

After that I went to the Alzheimers Society (I’m a Vice-President) at their splendid new riverside offices in St Katherine’s Dock (amazingly a lot cheaper than the the old over-crowded offices in Victoria) to join their Director of Research, Professor Clive Ballard and a team of people to discuss how we could progress nationally the research investment part of the recently published National Dementia Strategy. Dementia costs the NHS , local authorities and individuals about £20 bn annually, more than cancer and heart disease put together and yet the investment in biological and clinical research is paltry compared with these.  

Then to Westminster and a sandwich in the Bishop’s Bar  with Lord Williamson of Horton, who just happened to be there. 

After lunch to question time in the Chamber and the first part of the debates on the Marine and Coastal Bill, which there seems general support for. More or less everyone likes the idea of a rambling route round the whole coast (sorry, ‘land/sea interface’). Then finally to work on some amendments for the Health Bill, which have to be tabled before the end of this week. We finalised one rather complicated  amendment  in the early evening. Then a quiet evening at home with the Theoretical Chemist. It was a good day, not particularly busy, but interesting and worthwhile. I didn’t make much of a contribution to parliament today except do a lot of listening, some gossiping and  clarify what I want to do in the Committee stages of the Health Bill but it was fairly typical of a quiet ‘life in the day of…”