So we're not shooting in Bologna this week, for some mysterious and under-reported-on-telly reason. But I don't feel like I can moan, really, as we all know some stranded people who're being caused much more trouble. Volcanoes, eh? And some of the papers seem to have decided that we're saying "volcanologist" instead of "vulcanologist" these days. Hm.

What I did get to do this week was spend a couple of days shooting in our local maternity hospital again, and there's nothing to cheer you up like very small babies. Even the little ones in incubators don't distress me these days, knowing how most will have completely normal lives, are visited regularly by parents, and generally have it much better than their equivalents in El Salvador. Very nice to catch up with the director from the previous shoots again, too.

Been busily finishing off our NHS job recently, which remains an education and I still feel jammy to see so many different life-and-death jobs being done with such compassion and seriousness. I think you wouldn't get this overview of care, research and infrastructure if you worked in any capacity in a hospital - an exec wouldn't spend so much time looking at any one situation, a nurse only sees his ward, a porter only sees patients when they're on the move, a surgeon in theatre etc.

I was interested to learn more about the National Curriculum, and the direction in which it's headed, on another job last week, but apart from that my main educational experience for this week was actually attending lectures (something I didn't do much of at college). The first couple were at the Uni, recorded for Cambridge University Press. A talk on Women in Science contained a number of new (to me) names in the roster of neglected Victorian women of science, and a refreshing non-polemical discussion of Rosalind Franklin, who took the x-ray "pictures" which led Crick and Watson to their Nobel Prize for discovering DNA. A very nice talk on Why We Read Shakespeare was a bit less newsworthy for me, as my degree was in literature, but just as enjoyable.

There's such a thing as too much information, though, as my second set of lectures this week proved. The presentations of this year's junior doctors' research projects contained many illuminating gems, on subjects from the progress of alcoholism to end-of-life care. The discussion of gender reassignment surgery contained some overly informative photos of each step of the male-to-female operation, though. Interesting sociological commentary to go with it - the surgical problems are, if not solved, then surprisingly well worked-around. The social prejudice problems less so.

Perhaps most interesting to me was the research into health problems of the Cambridge homeless population, which corrected some ideas I had about how many people are in that situation locally, and what their daily circumstances are like, and uncovered some prejudice in the medical profession as well as problems from the patients' side.