farmdoc's blog post number 3

Last Monday evening, on my way home from the Launceston airport, I collected the mail. And among the work documents and the bills – and, I’m pleased to add, the cheques – were three glossy offerings: Travel + Leisure Australia, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians News, and the Medical Journal of Australia. These periodicals reminded me of the Dutch footballer’s wife in the TV series The Book Group who memorably exclaimed, ‘That is so not my journey’. Well I don’t really know what my journey is, or perhaps more correctly which direction it’s headed in, but I do know that it doesn’t pass through the waystations of upmarket travel (and adjunctive carbon-generating indulgences), and institutionalised and corporatised and managerialised medicine. Just think of all the trees that are cut down, and all the pollutants that are manufactured, just to create publications that people don’t ask for, don’t want and don’t need. I’ve tried to be taken off the mailing list for Travel + Leisure Australia – which comes to me courtesy of American Express – but without success. I recycle this paper, but I think that recycling – like carbon trading – is just a feel-good environmental copout.