The first axiom of the family vacation is that someone, possibly everyone, will get sick.

I could still remember how having a two day old baby makes you feel faintly sorry for everyone else, stuck in their wan unmiraculous lives.

It wasn't just that my breasts were sore and my legs seethed with restlessness at night. A knitted cap seemed to have settled on my brain as well. Never think that pregnancy is just a spare room in a woman's house; it changes everything - the heat, the light, the furniture.

Simple intervention - the time spent with a patient - is a very powerful ingredient of the patient-doctor contract. The evidence is against the traditions such as surgery for back pain being true - the evidence says it doesn't work.

Household hollowness comes around in irregular cycles, like meteor showers. But the true sign of a bad patch is that it never feels temporary or fixable. It has a shudder of the inevitable to it. The thought crosses your mind that when love goes it goes all at once, and forever.

Why are we, the most medicalized of societies, a culture in pain?

At a certain point, the soul exits from a cherished photograph, because we have come to the end of our loving projection into that moment.