Scott, my thoughts on care are also being formed in the context of trying to decode the meaning of “cancer care”, where it strikes me that care is both a covering euphemism for treatment, and is also the thing covered up: the many surreptitious ways in which humans practice small gestures of care for one another in complex spaces like treatment centres. I’ve recently become interested in hospital signage as a kind of event captioning: what does it mean to enter a building that is labelled in terms of care offered as a service, and in particular, how does this captioning frame the experiences you then have there?

I’ve read medical practitioner narratives that speak of the moment of passing from being a professional to becoming a patient that fit Derrida’s (and others’) thoughts about the indivisibility of guest and host. So beyond a position on a map there’s also the constant knowing that you are also the map itself.

The visitor/resident framework has all sorts of hospital resonances, I now see.