I blogged a couple of years ago about the uselessness of signs telling people not to run in the train station. My point: people don’t run in the station because they think it’s fun, or because they’re unaware of the dangers; they run in the station because the passenger experience encourages people to run, and posters saying the opposite will do very little to change that.

I don’t normally blog about what I’m reading in my spare time, but I’ve found a gem that deserves a wider audience. Jane Austen’s The History of England is a light-hearted pocket history of England from Henry IV to Charles I, as recounted by a chatty, bitchy, biased pro-Stuart narrator. I laughed out loud at lines like:

It’s always nice to look at a document that’s just been proofread and see no changes marked. It’s a bit less nice to hear the proofreader say that they marked several changes, but for some reason you can’t see them.

Today I was trying out a new way of working with proofreaders: Google Drive. Normally I just use Libre Office Writer or PDF editing software, whether I’m hiring a proofreader or being hired as a proofreader myself. But this kind of collaborative working is what Drive was designed for, right?

Do nursing and social media go together? Two years ago, the European Oncology Nursing Society (EONS) decided to find out by launching a social media presence and hiring me to run the Facebook and Twitter accounts. The initial 12-week trial was surprisingly successful; I was able to report back with solid evidence of growing engagement. So we continued. Last summer I ran a social media training workshop for the EONS Board, which resulted in several executive members developing their own Twitter presence for the first time.

Ski gloves getting a bit grubby? Need to give them a wash? No problem. Here are your instructions.

This is your irregularly scheduled update of what I’ve been doing since I last blogged on this site.

I wrote about some friends’ horrible experience with Vintage Bus Hire Ltd of New Romney. You can read my blog post on The Restless Consumer; I hope it will warn others not to use this firm for wedding transport.

Yesterday afternoon, a cyclist died of injuries sustained when she was hit by a left-turning HGV in London. The incident happened on the site of what will be the North-South cycle superhighway – if it ever gets built. If it gets built, this kind of terrible “accident” can’t happen again.

I’m delighted to announce that the book I’ve been working on all summer has now been published! It’s a book of interviews with people who have chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) and the idea behind the book is to convey the real-life experiences of people with this chronic illness. I hope that it shows the diversity of possible responses and also the positive side of life with this condition.

Having trouble getting your copy right? Try doing it three times. Yesterday I happened to mention on Twitter that the “write three versions” trick wasn’t working for me, which prompted another writer to thank me for the idea. That’s when I remembered that – as far as I know – I invented this technique, which is why other people won’t have heard of it.

As we approach the start of Plastic-Free July (and yes, I will be blogging about it again this year) I was interested to hear that the Glastonbury Festival organisers are trying to reduce plastic waste. Good for them. How are they doing it?