Mark Porton

“How can a health service so stripped of spare capacity cope with the demands of a once-ina-lifetime global pandemic? I bite my lip and think longingly of Germany’s twenty-nine intensive care beds per 100,000 people – four times the number of ICU beds in Britain”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“But it’s there. Dread. Every day is an opportunity to fuck up. Every decision, every meeting, every report. There’s no success, only the temporary aversion of failure. Dread.”
― Natasha Brown, Assembly

“If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in
her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And
forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it.
It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in
that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it
... yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than
anything else”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“Boris Johnson delivered an unexpectedly jaunty press conference in which he assured an anxious nation we would ‘turn the tide within the next twelve weeks’ and ‘send coronavirus packing in this country’, as though it were some unwanted door-to-door salesman.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking