In Views

Follow this topic

Bookmark

Record learning outcomes

ANOTHER GOOD READ

I have had the good fortune to read another novel written by a friend of mine.* The Death’s Head Chess Club (London: Atlantic Books) is a work of great sensitivity by John Donoghue, a pharmacist who hails from Liverpool. The main setting is Auschwitz and the central character is a French Jew who is a gifted chess player. Of equal importance in the story is an SS officer – badly wounded on the Russian front and so unfit for active service – who is on the staff at Auschwitz and sets up a chess club for his colleagues in order to improve their morale.

The story unfolds after the officer learns that there is a Jewish prisoner who is supposedly unbeatable at chess and is persuaded to take on players from the SS. The two central characters are eventually united in an unlikely friendship. I asked John what had sparked the novel. He tells me that he woke at 5am one morning with the idea in his head of a Jewish chess player in Auschwitz who played the SS for the lives of his fellow prisoners. This idea turned out to be the start of a literary journey that led to John spending 14 months reading up on the tactics of chess and the operation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

John tells me that he has never researched anything so intensively in his life. The result is a meticulously told and carefully constructed story – one that brings a measure of humanity to the inhumanity that was embodied in the awfulness of Auschwitz. Publication is timely, too, because it is 70 years since the life of Auschwitz as a concentration camp came to an end.

This is the second book that John has written. His first was Collision – about a disturbed young woman who believes she is possessed by the devil – published in 2008. I am already looking forward to the next one. I hope for John’s sake that, if he has another early morning thought, it does not involve him in quite so much preparatory work. (*In April, I wrote about The Tissue Trail by college friend Garth Gunston.)

CONFIDENTIALITY GOES BY THE BOARD

A recent press report that patients, after initial assessment in A&E, had been asked to carry laminated signs indicating their conditions brought to mind an old Monty Python sketch. The scene is a pharmacy and John Cleese, suitably attired in a white coat, emerges from the dispensary with an armful of medicines. Addressing a line of waiting patients, he inquires in a loud voice: “Er, who’s got the pox”. He then throws a bottle towards a man who had timidly raised an arm. He next asks: “Who’s got a boil on the bum – boil on the botty.” Another medicine is hurled at a hapless individual. Monty Python’s disregard for the privacy of patients was fictitious fun. And hilarious, it was, too. But there was no fun to be had in the A&E department at Broomfield Hospital, Essex. Patients were embarrassed at having to parade their afflictions. It was all in the interests of efficiency, we were told. I can only hope that the hospital has had a rethink. Otherwise the people in charge should be given their own signs to carry. “Insensitive fool” springs to mind.

ALARMING DEVELOPMENT

I am alarmed that the formal Essential Small Pharmacies Scheme has come to an end and that it is up to NHS England area offices to decide whether funding should be considered on an individual basis. A recognised national scheme in which pharmacists knew where they stood has been replaced by a lottery. Small pharmacies were hit a few years ago by thresholds for allowances being set at levels that they could not reach. This is another blow that will undoubtedly lead to closures. The government seems to take comfort from the availability of deliveries and internet businesses. But these are no substitute for face-to-face contact. I have yet to hear of an MUR or NMS intervention being done online!