"Balls like watermelons, I tell ya! Watermelons!"

I am so extraordinarily bored that it hurts. I'm on call, but it's an on-call like none I've ever done before. There is absolutely nothing to do. I'm only looking after about 12 patients, all of which are perfectly stable and require no active input. Yesterday I sat in my office from 8:30am to 8pm with only one foray onto the ward to put in a cannula and write up some paracetamol. Today I have not even done that much. My flatmate, The Pink Psychiatrist, has been doing on-calls like this ever since he defected to the Dark Side, a.k.a. psychiatry. Whenever one was coming up, he'd forever be moaning on about how terrible they were. Being a medic myself, I'm used to being run off my feet on an on-call and coming home exhausted. My standard retort was that he should count himself lucky and shut his bastard gob! Until now, that is. Now I know how torturous it is to be trapped in a place with diddly-squat to do.

I've read the entire Sunday paper plus supplements. I've listened to the radio. I've phoned my family and friends. I've drank so many hot bevrages and been to the toilet so many times that I'm beginning to wonder whether I should just bypass the middle man and throw the tea down the toilet as soon as it's made. I've even dusted off ye olde textbook of Neurofuckedology I found on the office shelf and done some work! All that and still only half way through with sweet fuck all to do. It's like being in prison.

Still, at least the papers were good. There's nothing like a good sex scandal to pass the time. It would seem that Mark Oaten has come a bit of a cropper over his liason with a young renter he met through Gaydar. Of course, the irony of the whole thing is that Gaydar is actually just an on-line meat market where literally hundreds of thousands of people offer themselves up in the hope of a quick shag...oh, sorry, I meant a 'meaningful relationship'. So why was this numbskull paying 80 smackers a pop? Really people that stupid deserve to be caught. And what was he thinking anyway? As if some street urchin that sells his arse for a living is going to have the moral compunction to pass on the opportunity of a tidy little earner just because it involves selling one of his clients down the swany. I can just imagine the kkk-ching! of the dollar signs in his hollow eyes the moment he realised that the baldy old slug with the penchant for football kits was actually a potential leader of the Lib Dems. Still, I can't help feeling a little bit sorry for him: imagine being exposed by a paper with a title as patently preposterous as "The News of the World". I mean as if! Anyway, I'm also rather disappointed in Mr Oaten. Not because of some moral revulsion on my part at his perceived failure as a role model; politicians are hardly the greatest of role models whether they are out shagging homo renters while their wife sits at home alone or not. No, I'm disappointed because of the lack of ridiculously implausible excuse proffered to account for his misdoings, a la Ron Davies' badger spotting or Kevin Spacey's dog walking. It's these aliens-stole-my-homework type excuses that are the punchline to the eternally-great joke that is another's fall from grace. To just admit to it and say you're sorry is to rob the people of their bread and circuses. Bloody Lib Dems: you can always rely on them to get it all wrong!