Epiphany

It has been nice to be home. There is nothing here for me now apart from my parents, but the whole place has a familiarity that I find deeply comforting. And, perhaps because I have little else to do, these little sojourns up North afford me some much needed thinking time.

It has become apparent to me recently that I've become increasingly shoddy at maintaining my relationships with people. Slowly but surely I've got worse. I started making less and less effort to arrange to meet up with people. I never phone anybody - not my friends, not my family, not the Australian. I read text messages people send and, unable to find the energy to reply immediately, put it off until I end up forgetting to do so altogether, which must appear unforgivably rude. I have relied too heavily on the goodwill of others in not abandoning me completely as a lost cause and can only be thankful that this has been forthcoming. So far, that is.

Then I saw the light. An awakening, a revelation, an epiphany. Not of the religious sort, but of a personal nature. It is too private to go into the actual substance of it, but, as with any epiphany, it is not the actual sign that is important but the significance it carries. Like the Spirit of Christmas Future, that experience painted in an instant an all-too-clear picture of what would come if I continued in that vein. Undoubtedly I would get more and more lazy and the goodwill and patience of others cannot be stretched indefinately. Eventually people would give up - quite rightly - on such a one-sided relationship and I would be left all on my own with nobody to blame but myself. Alone...and a slug.

And so like Ebeneezer himself, I did thank the Lord that all was not yet lost and did declare that changes there must be and changes there will be! Let's just hope I can succeed in turning words into actions. After all, an epiphany is for life not just for Christmas.

A Christmas Carol

Happy Christmas to one and all.

Awwwwwwwww.

Seriously though.

The Slugs of Marrakech

One new thing that I learned while holidaying is that Morocco is soooooo the new Tangier. For those who blissfully unaware of what the old Tangier was, allow me to educate: Tangier was none other than the Dark Continent's premier gay knocking shop. The playground of the aging, late twentieth-centuary Eurogays who had learned that, though money might not be able to buy you love, it can certainly buy you a good seeing to. And what to do when you've worked your through all the local renters and most of your retirement funds? Simple - hop over to Tangier and get yourself something a little exotic and a lot cheap.

All this I learned from a book, you'll be glad to know. The very same book that told me that Marrakech - the aptly named Pink City - had succeeded in establishing itself as the new whorehouse of Africa for the twenty-first-centuary away-gay. Young colts are attracted from all over the continent to ply their trade and make their fortune off the back off some aged Euro-queen (no pun intended). Naturally, I was interested; and keen to learn just how close to the surface this seedy underworld really was.

So, what did I find? Well, an hideous variety of common-garden Slugs for starters. They were everywhere to be seen, slipping across the Jemaa El Fnaa or up the Avenue Mohammed V, alone and on edge. Typically they were around 40-60 years old, outrageously coiffed (mullets and blond hilights abounded), and horribly camp. In one of the more notorious clubs, there was even a Timmy Mallet multicoloured silk shirt combined with skullet on show (a skullet is the hairstyle of man who previously had a mullet but has now gone bald on top leaving only the straggly turbospoiler at the back).

Then there was the actual renters. With the gaydar switched to scan, these shone like stars in the Islamic darkness of Marrakech. Those in the Jemaa El Fnaa tended to go for the slightly-too-long stare technique or a sly wink if they were feeling confident. Another breed stood out for their attire. Immaculately dressed in the latest European fashions with pair of ubercool sunglasses permanently perched on their pretty preened heads, they were mainly to be found loitering around Place de la Liberté or, in one case, standing on the roadside near the most fashionable bar in town. One low-class prozzy drunkenly made a grab for the arse in way of a come on. All very amusing.

I couldn't help but feeling sorry for the little tikes. Not because they were prozzies - I'm sure it's a fairly lucrative game for some of them - but because they had to sleep with sweaty, leering old Euro slugs to earn their crust. Personnally, I think I'd rather see if there was any work going down the sewers before I considered that!

The Spirit Of Christmas Past

Just a quick 'un to prove I'm not dead....

Yeah! I'm back from my holiday in Marrakesh!

Marrakesh. Now there's a bit of fun. Kinda medaevial market town without the teeth. I have to say, for the cheap gourmand, it's heaven. You can have all the ponciness of French haute cuisine without the price. And a few Morracan prozzimodos flung in for good luck.

I note from the responses to my previous post that Andy keeps a keen enough eye on his website to ken who's been linking to it. To be honest, I think he has a fair enough point: he deserves to know who posted his link up on the web as an example of what he would not like to become. Andy is diametrically opposed to my ideal in life: he is a very effective doctor - the kind of doctor you'd want to see if you'd been in a car crash and you were bleeding out. He is not, however, the guy I'd probably want to see had I just been told that my CT scan showed a 'funny looking grey bit' that nobody was yet prepared to explain. As far as I'm concerned, Andy seems like one of those medics who would be far better at communicating with the consultants than with the patients. I could, of course, be wrong...but really how likely is that?!

Cortisol Overload

I'm drinking red wine to prevent myself having a heart attack (apparently it doesn't work, by the way). I have just spent the entire day on a train. Yes, the entire day. Just to collect my passport from the ever-so-conveniently located passport office in NEWPORT, SOUTH WALES! 5 hours round-trip for 10 minutes spent in the passport office. It was exhausting.

I subjected myself to this because I desperately want to go away. And I've now just spent 3 hours on Expedia/Last minute/Opodo trying to book a cunting holiday somewhere vaguely interesting and not ice-cold to absolutely no avail because none of the cuntish airlines do e-tickets! Sweet Jesus H. Christ, how can I book a paperless ticket to go to Wales on the backwards bloody railway system 6 hours before I travel but not to take a flight in 2 days time? How arcane are paper-cunting-tickets!

Anyway, I'm going to lie down in a darkened room with a wet flannel on my brow for an hour or two before I burst an artery or something. Then I'm going to get wrecked.

PS: Don't you think it's a little freaky that Riaz's bio-thing is written in the 3rd person? Kinda schizo, really.

PPS: Nein, Herr D&C. A different Ice Queen, but from the same mould.

Cuntification

To understand the deleterious effects of medicine on the soul, please find time to review the toe-curling website of Dr Beggs, a fellow graduate of our year, at www.andrewbeggs.org.

Train Crash

The exam is over. Thank the Lord for that. Unfortunately, I was accidentally trapped on a table full of post-exam dissectors in the pub after the event and so was forced to relive most of paper three in minute detail. It turns out great minds did not think alike and I feel I can look forward to a replay next year.

On a brighter note, I feel absolutely wretched this morning (nice word, wretched - not used enough). Combined with the fact I can't remember how I got home or when, I think it's safe to presume that I had a good time last night, though possibly a fairly rapid one. I now fully intend to laze about the house, drink tea and generally do absolutely fuck all until I go ice skating tonight, which, I'm sure, will be simply charming.

Cry Baby

I'm very, very, very SAD!

because...

1) I slept all day yesterday after my nights and went out clubbing until 3am last night and now have woken up feeling slightly rough with only half a day before the exam. So much for my two days of heavy revision. The exam is a write-off and a nine-hour long one at that!

2) I phoned the passport office today and I'm not going to get my passport in time for my holiday next week. I thought a month and a half would be easy enough time to get the thing, but no, apparently not. So now I'll have to wait for another 6 months before I get any time off to go anywhere.

No wonder I'm feeling all Wade Walker.

De Profundis.

Firstly, hello to Vegas. I'm not entirely sure who you are either but I have my theories.

It's 2:30AM and all is reasonably quiet for the moment in the wretched hell hole that is A&E. I really should try and grab some kip so that I can do some work tomorrow but I'm feeling guilty that the ward SHO and HO are both absent from the mess, suggesting a busyness which I just can't bring myself to help them with. Thus, as a form of penence for my cuntishness, I have decided that I will deny myself the comforts of my bed to sit and type instead.

I have been periodically seized by paroxysms of fear recently at the thought of getting all 'middle aged'. I'm still not entirely sure precisely when 'middle aged' begins but I fear it might be sometime soon. I'm pretty sure when I was 17 I must have thought it started right about now. Once here, however, I've found it more convenient to push the boundry back a little bit...to thirty, say. That only gives me roughly another four years of life before my world begins to slowly crumble around me and I sink into depression and apathy. And what will be the trigger for this change? Simple: the transition of others and my lack thereof.

By transition I mean the movement between different stages in life. Admittedly, these are not set in stone and regression is always a possibility but, by and large, the majority of people seem to move through fairly discernible stages in their lives. So far my friends and I have made our way through a few of them together: we've done infancy; then dependency and education; and now independent and working. The next big transition fro my friends will be into marriage and then children. These are not really possibilities for me (unless I suddenly decide that getting myself a trophy wife and living the lie sounds like a good idea). And there wouldn't even seem to be anything to substitute in its place. So, what will I do? Continue on with the drinking, the clubbing and the cruising till I get a cardiomyopathy and my heart dilates up to become about as effective as an ASDA carrier bag? End up in A&E as a haggard and broken-down wreck? Well, yes, quite probably. What's worse is that as a gay guy gets older and loses his looks, he becomes an object of pitty in a world that venerates youth and beauty beyond all else. In fact, I sometimes feel that being gay might be a bit like having social progeria. 'Slugs', as we fondly call the older gay, can always be found stuck to the wall of any gay bar, hungrily watching in the midst the throng. They are always there, but seldom noticed. Soon I too will be a player no more; just a passive observer of other people's amusements. Sigh. What's the point in that?

No transition, no advancement... just stagnation.

Outed!

I had possibly the most pleasurable on-call ever last night. I saw three patients between 9pm and 1am, then I went to bed, and when I woke up (not even to the sound of my bleep, I might add) it was 7:30am! It was all too much and I must confess to having to bleep myself to make sure the thing hadn't stopped working and there weren't in fact queues of riotous patients waiting to be seen in A&E. It hadn't and there weren't. I'm praying for a repeat tonight but I fear there can be no pleasure without pain and it might be hell on Earth. Yet come what may, I'm determined to stay happy as tonight will be my last shift before my month long holiday starts! Yes, that's right - a whole month over Christmas and New Year. Hurray for the my crazy rotation!

There remains the slight problem of the exam. I'm beginning to wonder if failure might not be so bad a thing. Perhaps it will dispel this destructive idea that I might still just pass it with no revision provided I happen to get lucky because that's what happened with Part 1. Then again, I really don't fancy paying for and sitting it again so I suppose I'll use Monday and Tuesday to do as much last-minute cramming as is possible.

Finally, by some unknown mechanism, which will probably turn out to be really obvious, it would appear The Lost Doctor has somehow managed to find my blog. I had kinda intended to keep it private, though I'm not really sure why. Perhaps because I had copied his white-on-black background and was ashamed of my lack of orginality? Or perhaps not. Anyway, if you do happen to be reading this, don't take it too seriously - it's just a little bit of escapist fun for me!

The Ice Queen Strikes Back

What is this? ---------------->

Alas, this is me after a run in with the Ice Queen bitchosaurus of a registrar who made me stay behind late on a 10 hour shift by insisting that I clerk one more patient in the last 20 mins. She only had three fucking patients to be clerked and there were still two SHOs, a HO and herself after I went so it wasn't like they were drowning in referrals. I thought maybe she'd forgotten that I was supposed to go home at 7pm so I tried a little friendly tug at the heart strings by inquiring if she might have a reasonably simple one I could see quickly so I could get off on time (I later realised that said strings were not in fact attached to any heart, but to a cold, dark stone that remained resolutely unmoved by all tugging). There was a moment's pause before she looked up from her list, her naturally miserable face set like marble, and instantly froze me to the spot with her icey reply: as an SHO you should be seeing a patient every 15 mins! "OK.", I said slowly; "you horrible, bastard-faced, cold-hearted, evil bitch!", I thought quickly. Then, just to make sure I knew who was boss, she handed me some 900 year-old patient with "?TIA, decreasing mobility and confusion". A history and full neuro exam on some garrulous old baggage who barely even knows what day of the week it is never mind what's brought her in to hospital - that's just cruel!

No wonder I ended up having to be stretched out of the hospital at 7:40pm in the state shown above: worked to the bone and frozen to the core by the evil Ice Queen registrar.