I am a Master of Science! Today I received my official mark sheet for my MSc in Strategic Leadership, and so if I so choose I guess I can go around putting MSc after my name. I used to work with someone (manage them even) who put all the letters she had from her academic courses on the bottom of all emails. I found this slightly odd and just a bit pretentious. I wanted, as her manager to tell her to take them off, but felt I was being petty. Interestingly now she has a new manager she has stopped this practice, not sure if the two things are related.

Anyway as I was saying I am a master. I have been wondering whether I really want to go to the graduation, and after much reflection, debate with my husband and general adding up of the cost of gown hire etc, decided to give it a miss. I went to my BSc graduation and thoroughly enjoyed it. I took along hubby, teen son who might not have been a teenager then and my parents, who as you might expect were very proud. But having been and done that, and plus thinking of how much champagne and food I could buy if there was no £41 a time for the gown and silly hat and no £19 a time for guest tickets the decision has been made. No award ceremony is going to make me more masterly after all!

A blog linked to me the other day and in the process called Life in the NHS ‘tame’, though ‘worth a read’. Now I am not offended by this, but it has made me think. You see, in real life people say I am quite scary. I am knowledgeable in the things I do and I am not renound for my great tolerance of fools so to be accused of being even slightly tame comes as a surprise. But of course in my blog, (as I have discussed before) I struggle to be myself. In a way I would have loved to have been writing this when I was in proper clinical practice. Even with the constraints of patient confidentiality I think writing about the trials and tribulations of nursing would have been much easier than writing about management and some of the encounters I have these days. You see, when you do a job which covers a whole county, and when there isn’t anyone else doing the same specific job it becomes just slightly tricky to discuss subjects with any degree of openness. I want to say so much, to tell the reader about what it is really like to be trapped in middle management between the powerful and the great (or those who think they are) and everyone else. But it would be true to say that I am a little (well more than a little) nervous of doing so.

So in the mean time, I will remain tame, but I am also masterly and that cannot be a bad combination!