The kids love museums!

My Stories of the World feature has appeared in Museums Journal but it's behind a paywall so no link is possible. Museums are exciting for most people over 30 but if they connect with young people that's really something to shout about. I was pleased with this article because it shows why worthy is not so dull - this is the way we inch ahead as a society.

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Published in the Grauniad.

My Stories of the World piece has now appeared in Society Guardian. The article focuses in on the Foundling Museum project, where looked after children met abandoned children, now in their eighties, who had been in care at the Foundling Hospital. There is also a picture gallery of the young people's work - not the best quality pics unfortunately, but it tells a moving story. The Guardian did a strange edit on the first half so if you think any of the sentences in the first half look odd - as my dad did, it seemed to be all he noticed! - that's why. But I still love you Guardian.

After Footlocker and JD Sports, is the NHS next?

Just ghosted an opinion piece for CIHM which has gone up on Guardian professional. Do we really want patients to think of themselves purely as customers, with the potential for footstamping and tantrums that entails? It may have some short-term benefits but ultimately it encourages mindless individualism, the last thing the NHS needs. What is needed is true patient engagement and consumerist discourse works against that. Check the full argument out - by CIHM's brilliant Becky Malby and Irwin Turbitt - here .

Face to face with a great feminist

I'm interviewing academics at the University of East London for a research brochure. The other day I met someone called Barbara Taylor. "So what's the real world impact of your book going to be?" I asked chirpily. "Well, it's going to be published by Penguin," she replies. "It's about mental health, a mixture of historical study and memoir as I've spent three years researching the asylum system, and I was in Friern Barnet hospital in the 1980s. Books like that tend to attract a lot of attention." She's only The Barbara Taylor - world famous historian of feminism! Actually I've never heard of her, but one has a way of noticing when one is the presence of brilliance and a quick google afterwards confirmed I had been. The book is about how we look after each other - everyone needs looking after, mental health is just one example of that. She says that question is nothing new, it's always been a preoccupation of feminism. But th...

Varya Shaw

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