My first post of the new year and I must be slacking, after all it is 5th January and so if my new years resolution was to blog daily, then I would already have failed. Luckily I am avoiding resolutions as such, and it feels better to blog when you actually have something to say or as in my case today are trying to avoid doing something more important. What can be more important than blogging I hear you cry? Well the long awaited and discussed assignment for my MSc is due in on Monday. I am 2000 words or so into the write up and actually feel increasingly confident that I will actually be able to write another 3000 by Sunday but at this very moment communicating here on my blog seems more attractive.

It hardly seems possible that only 2 weeks away I had finished work for Christmas and was getting prepared for the big day (plus boxing day when I had more guests here). Tomorrow, twelth night, I will take down the decorations, and send the tree for recycling (see I am trying to be green) and Christmas will officially be over.

I returned to work on Tuesday, I feel strangely serene about the place. Not excited to face the year as I might have in other years, but then you can’t get very excited when you don’t know what job you are meant to be doing. But some of the old enthusiasm is back and what work I have will be done well (I think). I still await further instructions and also a job I can apply for, I am reticent about the idea of another job in training and education in the NHS but we will see what is on offer before I make my decision. Yesterday, funnily enough I did some one to one coaching with someone who is in a similar position to me but whose replacement job is now in the offing and who was nervous about interview etc. Every now and then I have to ask myself if I am qualified to help people like this, after all, I can’t have performed that well in my own interview. My confidence has definitely taken a knocking, but people around me keep telling me not to be so silly and that I am as competent as ever (whatever that means!)

Apparently the UK is soon to be short of nurses (and indeed junior doctors), so I can always go back to nursing if things get really bad, or failing that get a job as a nurse practitioner and take a junior doctors job (ah yes time to keep Dr Crippen happy for another year!) The NHS ship feels like it is heading towards the iceberg but I am not sure it is actually the titanic or that it will sink and it is up to people like me to help keep it that way, even if someone in my own trust seems to be trying to throw me off the deck without a life jacket!