This is your irregularly scheduled reminder that I blog in other places too. Most recently I’ve been blogging about a challenge called Plastic-Free July for the Sustainable Witney website.

My hatred of the shop Lush is a bit of a joke among my friends. I love the products, but I can’t bear the experience of shopping there.

Think about all the times you’ve bought something online. Now see if you can remember how many times you were asked for a “contact phone number” (as opposed to, er, a non-contact phone number?) so that the seller can get in touch if there are any problems with your order.

For the benefit of people who’ve never bought shoes in the sale: it’s the norm for sale shoes to be organised by size rather than by style. That’s basically because all the sale stock is out on the shelves, so there’s no point finding a shoe you like in the wrong size and then asking if they have it in a 5. They won’t. It’s a jungle out there.

I recently got an invitation to connect on LinkedIn, from a name I didn’t recognise. I clicked through to the profile and the penny dropped: this person works for a company where I applied for a job quite a long time ago. It all came back to me then: I spent hours jumping through the application hoops, but wasn’t even given the courtesy of a rejection letter.

I recently attended the NUJ’s Reporting on our health services masterclass. It was about how to carry out quality reporting on health issues, at a time when the cuts and restructuring in our health service are mirrored by cuts and restructuring in our newsrooms.

I hope people realised that yesterday’s blog post criticising gender quotas was intended to be light-hearted. Now it’s time to be serious.

I’ve heard a few good arguments lately for imposing gender quotas when selecting speakers for tech conferences. But since the phrase “imposing quotas” seems to bring many people out in a rash, let’s call it “adopting selection processes that lead to greater diversity” or “aiming for a more representative mixture of speakers”.

A acquaintance of mine, a vet, reported today from the “Every Pet, Every Time” UK conference that 70% of human patients have forgotten their doctor’s advice 60 seconds after leaving the consulting room. She commented that doctors and vets have much to learn on communication.