"End-stage renal disease is a terminal illness with a glomerular filtration rate of less than 15 mL/min." - [Hashmi et al.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499861/) My current state is an estimated GFR of 7 with dialysis 5 days per week to replace my destroyed kidney function. But the basic fact remains that this condition is terminal; it's just the question of how long it takes to finish me off.

People often think that reading a novel is a very linear activity. You start at the start and proceed through the text. As in most media forms, though, the beginning of any novel is really not truly its beginning. The American author, Thomas Pynchon, the focus of my paper today, is famed, it could be argued, mostly for three things.

The Research Excellence Framework is the UK system for rewarding unhypothecated research funding from the government to universities. It gives a block of funding that can be used in any way that the institution sees fit to advance research. It’s particularly useful in disciplines with less project funding to give research time to individual academics. The problem is, lots of academics hate REF.

When training PhD students and other postgraduates, we often have a section on publication. It covers the basic background process, the rudiments of peer review, and what to expect. There is often, also, a lengthy discussion of ensuring that you publish in the place that will do most for your career. What is the _prestige_ status of the journal, for instance?

I am tired of medical decisions with a trade-off. On a regular basis I am presented with decisions that have deferred negative consequences in order to fix something in the present. The two examples that spring to mind are the BK virus nephropathy and hip replacement surgery.

I have suffered from rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for almost twenty years now, which is almost half my life. If I had known back at the start of my diagnosis what I know now, I do not know for sure that things would be very different, but there was a heck of a lot I did not know. How complex is this disease and the things it does? This complex: "Rheumatoid arthritis" sounds like the sort of disease that old people get that isn't very serious.

Over the past few weeks I've been working to pack the entire Crossref database into a distributable SQLite file. While this sounds somewhat insane -- the resulting file is 900GB -- it's quite a cool project for, say, embedded systems work in situations where no internet connection is available. It also provides speedy local indexed lookups, working faster than the internet-dependent API ever could.

As many of you know, I took secondment from my academic role this year to work on research and development at Crossref. A variety of factors inspired this, not least my health and wanting to be able to work from home. After a year, I have reflected on my experience of transferring to a very good employer outside of academia. If you did the same, your mileage might vary, because it all depends where you end up working and for whom.

2023 continued to pose the all-important question: just how many health disasters can I endure? This year, I started haemodialysis as my kidneys entered the extremely worryingly named "end-stage renal failure". This turns out to be a very long-term prospect, as I can't have a transplant owing both to BK viremia (which caused the kidney damage in the first place) and a conflict with the immunosuppression that treats my rheumatoid arthritis.

A letter to the Editor of the _Guardian_, who declined to publish it. Dear Madam, Your Economics Editor, Larry Elliott (5th December, “[I’ve got news for those who say Brexit is a disaster: it isn’t. That’s why rejoining is just a pipe dream](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/05/brexit-disaster-rejoining-channel-europe-economy?CMP=share_btn_tw)”), offers an opinion piece that appears to be based on little more than his own