Glasgow

Glasgow isn't that big and it's possible to get around on foot without sacrificing too much shoe leather. That's what I learned from Lonely Planet Scotland when I planned my accommodation for the conference in this city.

Put simply, Glasgow is the kind of place where we don't have to be picky for hotels very close to the conference venue. Although I have not much sightseeing time, I decided to find one at Glasgow's West End, just a quick subway from downtown. As in so many British cities, the western part – upwind of industrial pollution – was historically the most desirable. 

The key drawcard for the location of my hotel is its green spaces. The much-loved Botanic Gardens with series of stunning Victorian glasshouses are within walking distance. And so is Kelvingrove Park, right next to Kelvingrove Arty Gallery and Museum. These iconic sites close before five, but the Waterstones bookshop and public library on my doorstep won't close until eight in the evening.

What could be better location than that?      

Baðstofa

The Three Little Pigs has long been one of the classic fables. This week I finished a fiction that's more haunting, Burial Rites. 

The story has also taken place in simple house made of primitive material like turf and stone (not straws, I know). They call such centuries-old farmhourse a badstofa.

The big bad wolf was also killed in this fiction. The three "pigs" in this darker story, however, were also executed for murder. Sadly.

Burned

Many of us know that our kids come first, of course they do. But not all of us.

In some darkest moments and for some less fortunate kids – like Paul Sinton-Hewitt who had been growing up with struggling parents – putting the kids first can be more difficult than asking a cow to recite a poem.

Paul Sinton-Hewitt, the founder of parkrun and being awarded a CBE by Queen Elizabeth II, wasn't so sure his parents had done a damn good job to raise him. At age five, he was sent to boarding school and experienced terrible bullying. Oh, that was a toughie for a kid to go through those adverse childhood experiences like parental separation, multiple school moves, and traumatic bullying. 

Imagine a junior school kid wearing a scarf near Johannesburg. To a nine-year-old, that's ridiculous. Deep down, Paul Sinton-Hewitt knew the humiliation, but he had no choice after being strangled by a looped cord around his neck. The boys kicked the chair away, and let the noose pulling tight under his full weight. He could hardly breathe for ten seconds and ended up with a bloody wound cut deeply into his neck from ear to ear. 

Having grown up with nobody to listen to his worries or step in to sort things out, Paul Sinton-Hewitt had become a closed book. Over time, he became devastated with faulty coping mechanisms. When he became a father, he didn't know any nursery rhymes because nobody had sung them to him as a child. As a result of his upbringing and the heartache, his marriage hit the rocks and he felt torn. 

Paul Sinton-Hewitt got caught in a cycle of repeatedly getting burned, until his finding of connection and purpose in starting a weekly time trial run in his local park. Little did he know that from just thirteen runners on a Saturday, parkrun – a name he coined and with capital letter dropped – would grow into a 10-million-strong community across five continents. 

From a grassroots community into a social movement.

Ocean

From the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, the global population of sea otters fell from 300,000 to less than 2,000 individuals. That's a result of human hunting; these marine animals have the thickest fur of any mammals. I learned these from the recent David Attenborough's landmark series, Ocean.

His book shows us how the world is both desperately fragile yet astonishingly resilient. 

Little did we know the kelp forests are diminishing, albatross populations are crashing, seashells being washed up on the beach are disappearing. Such environmental amnesia or change in the accepted norms is called "shifting baseline syndrome", a societal phenomenon first described by fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly. In short, what we see today we tend to think of as normal, simply because we get used to a degraded environment. 

Arguably, humans are less sensitive to the changing ecosystem than other animals. A look at the Southern Ocean and you'll be amazed by how the animals get along with the temperature. Crocodile icefish, among all, is the only vertebrate that doesn't have red blood cells. No one is sure of the evolutionary advantage of this adaptation. Without red cells, it is harder to transport oxygen around their bodies. To compensate, they have evolved oversized hearts and scale-free skin that allows them to absorb oxygen directly from the seawater. To live in water around Antarctica, crocodile icefish have evolved antifreeze proteins in their blood which limit the growth of ice crystals, making the freezing point of their blood slightly below the freezing point of seawater. Now that global warming is raising the water temperature, warmer water has lowered oxygen solubility, putting them at risk of suffocation. 

What a tough life. 

Pachinko

I started reading Pachinko, an epic novel written by Min Jin Lee, before heading to Shaoxing for a conference.

I didn't realise it could have taken me longer than the trip to finish the book. What took so long? That's indeed a long story spanning nearly 100 years of history. A moving novel about identity and struggle with discrimination. 

There are countless examples of fighting for identity in the story. Sunja, the daughter of a crippled fisherman in this novel, was told, "For a woman, the man you marry will determine the quality of your life completely. A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life." Many people like Sunja can't reverse a curse, and more so when they believe there is a curse in their blood. In a macabre environment of Japan-versus-Korea thinking, some of the Koreans had to to choose a Japanese surname to hide their blood. 

The worldview that saw people born with a curse is metaphorically a game of pachinko. In this game of pinball, the first strike of the ball against the flipper more or less determines how the game will play out. Sunja thought that there was a curse in her blood, similar to the way the fate of pinball is decided at the moment of plunger hitting the ball. 

Patient

Tilly Rose is an author and a patient advocate. She wrote a powerful story about being patient and a patient. 

Be Patient is an eye-opening account of her being a seriously ill patient without a diagnosis. That should be a must-read book for all medical students and doctors. Every year, there are cases with mysterious or unexplained symptoms leading to so-called medical gaslighting – "it's all in your head."

What makes the situation worse is the undefined illness that won't fit in one particular medical specialty. Tilly Rose could be having paroxysms of clammy body and shaking arms. For no reason, her brain could go foggy. One minute her headache was unbearable, the next she would be crying out with weak and wobbly legs. Then she put on extra body fluid enough to fill three gallon jugs. Now that each specialist is often interested in looking at his or her discipline only, Tilly Rose turned out being lost in a barren landscape or no-man's-land. 

"I imagine taking a photograph of my whole body and cutting it up into horizontal strips, separating all the different parts of me," Tilly Rose concluded. "The doctor holding the photo of my heads has no idea what my feet look like. I am trapped in a system that relies on putting people in boxes. Bodies aren't made for boxes."

To stop this vicious cycle of losing sight of our patients, here is my simple rule: Piece the photograph back together and learn to read the whole picture. Not a separate box for each strip.

Bees

In prehistoric times, the jawbones or tooth sockets of extinct rodents and mammals were nests for bees. Fast forward to today, bees are experiencing a massive global crisis; they have been dying off in massive numbers. Dwindling habitats and onslaught of pesticides account for a sharp decline in the colony numbers. Then came parasites and climate changes. Some beekeepers reported that 55 percent of their colonies had perished over the previous year – their worst losses ever.

Perhaps that's one of the reasons National Geographic put up the title "Secrets of the Bees" in the current magazine issue and their new docuseries, now streaming on Disney Plus. 

Sadness aside, we are now getting more fascinated by scientific discovery that bees are far smarter than we ever imagined. Even Karl von Frisch, the Nobel laureate who were famous for deciphering bees' dance language, had once commented that, "The brain of a bee is the size of a grass seed and is not made for thinking."   

When a team of scientists lamented that the parrots in a laboratory had failed a string-pulling test – a classic experience for testing animal's cognitive prowess to pull a string to retrieve a reward – one of them casually commented, "I bet our bumblebees could do that."

Everyone laughed.

But as the team soon learned, the bumblebees aced the examination by successfully pulling the sugar-coated flower using the attached string.