A Journey of Friendships

The themes running through the book are friends and friendships. It is not an academic study of friendship. It is about the relationships with some of the people the author has encountered during his life. Readers will be able to define for themselves whom they regard as good, best, close etc. friends. This book should act as a catalyst for them to arrive at these definitions. The book shows how the class ceiling was broken by his liberal thinking parents, university education and marriage. He made deep interclass friendships. He was brought up with a live-in nanny, housekeeper, gardener etc. His mother was brought up old money and upper class in Germany. Several of his friends are professors and the human sides of these and those who taught him are demonstrated. His friendship and love of Frank, his brother, a merchant navy radio officer, resulted in his love of the sea and cruising with his parents and friends. During the pandemic lockdowns of 2020/21, his garden became a friend. His relationship with the garden was a major factor in preventing loneliness and depression. Social therapeutic gardens. A significant involvement with science in his early life supplied him with an enquiring mind and involved deep working relationships with fellow scientists. Some of the scientific work undertaken jointly with his PhD supervisor, W R Keatinge, as described. Was he a friend? Since his wife died in 2015, social media and electronic means of communicating have kept him in close touch with friends and others. The evolution and some history of these modes of communication used by the author over 50 years and are described. He was actively in politics in the earl 1980s. Political work creates friendships and camaraderie amongst campaigners.

Richard Sloan MBE, MB, BS, BSc, PGCE, PhD, FRCGP Richard Sloan is the son of two General Practitioners, an Irish father and German mother. He was brought up in Airedale, Castleford, a deprived area then and remains so in 2024. They lived in a large family home semidetached from the GP surgery. He lives there now. He was educated at schools in Airedale and Wakefield. He studied medicine at University College London (UCL), then The London Hospital Medical College, qualifying in 1969. After registering as a doctor in 1970, he worked as a research and teaching lecturer in physiology at The London. He and his supervisor, Professor W. R. Keatinge, invented an electronic ear thermometer which was manufactured for a while. From there, he worked as a GP in Cheltenham for four years. After his father died and mother retired, Richard, and his wife, Kathleen, bought the empty house and surgery, and developed the practice from a zero-patient base in 1978. In 1982 he was elected as a Social Democratic Party Councillor to the Wakefield District Council. Teaching became one of the loves of his life. He became an Associate Director for postgraduate general practice education for Yorkshire. and then education advisor and appraisal lead for GPs in the Wakefield Primary Care Trust, retiring in 2010.He has been a trustee of several local charities during the past 15 years. This is his third published book since 2012.