What does an average week look like for you? You get up, go to work, you come home late and you’re exhausted so you go to bed, then you have to get up, go to work, come home, go to bed. Then you feel down because all you do is go to work and go home so you buy some stuff to help you feel better and before you know it you are stuck in a cycle of working, shopping, sleeping, working shopping sleeping.

Rubbish is an emotive topic in Brighton & Hove. The two landfill sites that serve Sussex are due to be full right about now - and then where will our waste go? Environmental concerns and stringent EU regulations means there is no option for opening new ones. The Newhaven incinerator, which, if built, will burn a large amount of our waste, is a plan that has been vociferously opposed. The large communal bins on the street cause residents to write furious letters and have inspired the perplexing Say No To Bins campaign.

Getting around Brighton & Hove on foot, bicycle or public transport has never been easier. The city has a fantastic bus service, a network of cycle routes, walks with superb views, and good rail links. On top of this, technology is making travel around the city as smooth as possible. Real time information at bus stops, for example, give passengers up to the minute details of when the next service is due. Award-winning 'talking bus stops' mean blind and partially sighted people can get information that others take for granted.

Over the last 50 years, we have changed from a nation of shopkeepers to a nation of shoppers. While a certain amount of our spending is necessary - food or loo roll, for example - a lot of what we buy just isn’t. The truth is, a new dress every week isn’t going to make you a better person, just a poorer person on a poorer world. Recent figures show that 46 per cent of people’s clothes have not been worn in the last year. That’s nearly 2.4 billion items crumpled in the back of our wardrobes. For each person, this works out at 14 items of clothes a year that we never wear, over a lifetime costing £12,810.

Our world is changing. So too is the way we live and our homes are coming along for the ride. They are becoming not just places we live, but places we work, places we shop, places we communicate with strangers on the other side of the world using high speed communications technologies, and even places we generate our own energy. For most people, their entire identity is wrapped up in where they live, how they live and who they live with. For outsiders to blunder in and demand we make changes – fix our windows, lag our lofts, change our electrical bits and bobs – can feel like an affront to our lifestyles and an invasion of our space.

Food is such an important part of our lives - and not just because we need to eat to survive. So much is connected to the food we eat, more so than many of us may realise.The impacts of our food system (the technical term for how food gets from the farm to your fork) on the world around us are enormous. The way the majority of our food is grown and transported is hugely resourceintensive (especially water and oil), and is often harmful to the environment. Plus, many farmers both here in the UK and overseas don’t receive a fair price for their produce due to competing pressures to keep prices low.

Local community, conservation and environmental groups are often at the forefront of tackling global problems. They are the heartbeat of the community, part of our social fabric, without which we would all be poorer off. The problem is they are all too often overlooked by those in power because of their size and often parochial nature. That is, unless they catch the public imagination and media eye and suddenly everyone wants a piece of the action. These events might seem rare but it is interesting to note that many of our biggest campaigning charities started off with a few people sitting around a kitchen table and a simple idea.

At the end of 2008, we saw governments across the world pump in billions of pounds to propup a weakened banking sector. It is estimated the bailout will cost tax payers more than £1,000,000,000,000. That’s enough cash to feed the world’s 800m starving people for nearly 200 years. Much of the money wasted by the banking sector has been used to fuel an unsustainable increase in consumer spending, pushing landfill, incinerators and the planet to bursting point.

Get hitched, knocked up and kick the bucket. Sounds short, doesn’t it? And not particularly sweet. But these three little throwaway phrases constitute what are offi cially known as REALLY BIG LIFE EVENTS.

Let’s break them down – we’ve got committing yourself to one person and vowing to love them with all your heart as long as you both shall live; bringing a new life into the world and being responsible for its wellbeing; and finally leaving the world, the only home you’ve ever known, forever. Put like that, they do sound pretty big.

Today, the amount of information available to us is greater than at any other time in history. According to the Mobile Data Association, in 2007 in the UK, we sent 57 billion text messages, and that rate is increasing by 40 per cent a year. The internet is so vast that in 2008 Google indexed 1 trillion web pages - that’s 1,000,000,000,000 - compared to just 26 million in 1998.

There is a much quoted ancient Chinese saying which goes "may you live in interesting times." It was apparently intended as a curse, but I much prefer to interpret it as the gift of great opportunity. We are undoubtedly living in a time of great change in the world, and these changes involve medicine and healthcare as much as any other fi eld of human activity.