Le Nozze di Pieman

I've just had the pleasure of bumping into Dr D&C in the corridors of our hallowed institution. Long time, no see, as they say. We went for a coffee and a chat; and, for a little while, I might well not have been trapped in the hospital on call. Sadly he is not as unemcumbered with work this weekend as I and had to return to his labours promptly, leaving me at a loose end again.

Another friend of mine also provided me with some happy news this week. The Pieman has finally desisted in the riduculous charade that was his denying that his marriage to his very long-term girlfriend was not an immenent inevitability; he has gone and got himself engaged. About bloody time is all I have to say on the matter. I am already relishing the thought of the bachannalia that will be his stag do. In fact, I have little doubt that most of our friends reacted to the good news by formulating plans to pour the maximum amount of booze down the Pieman's neck (and, indeed, I am partly convinced that it is this very fact that has delayed their engagement for such a long time)! My sole advice, Pieman, would be to make sure the stag do is sufficiently separated from the wedding so as to accomadate a short stay in hospital and a protracted and painful recovery without any disruption to the happy plans.

Speaking of marriage, I stumbled upon an American, right-wing blog called Opinionnation Times yesterday which reminded me that England has been surprisingly progressive in adopting the civil partnership. Over in loony land, the religious right are still getting all het up about the alledged debasement of the sanctity of marriage that would occur if two poofs were afforded the legal rights of married couples. Apparently the very greatness of America is set to crumble because of it. Honestly! The melodramatics of the right never cease to amaze.

Stripped of its religiosity, the core of marriage is a public avowal of commitment. With this pubic avowal come state-protected rights that have important implications for gay couples, legally, financially and socially. It is not fair to deny people these rights on the basis of outmoded prejudice concerning the acceptability of homosexuality as a lifestyle. In the end, it is to the benefit of society as a whole if people - gay or straight - are encouraged to enter into lasting, meaningful relationship and a legal bond is a excellent way of cementing that relationship and preventing people just walking away after the slightest hiccough. For once, England and the current government ought to be proud of itself for its forward thinking on this one.

Prisonner Cell Block H

Sigh. Back on call again. It's the weekend so there's nothing really to do.

Just sit.

And stare at the clock.

While the hours slowly slip by.

I devoured the paper too hastily this morning. I should have paced myself so that it lasted me the day but, in my eagerness to read about the dethroning of Red Ken, I accidently gobbled the whole thing up with my eyes like a greedy child. It seems a terrible tragedy that the Newt could be so unceremoniously deposed by three humourless functionnaries. So he got unlucky when he picked a Jew to hold up in comparison to a Nazi concentration camp guard, but you can see what Livingston was getting at: that disregard for people justified by a claim 'only to be doing one's job'. I think Mr Fieldgold's overly-precious indignation at the comparison is slightly non-sensical and, in reality, probably journalistically expedient. How can it be considered anti-semitic to hold the Nazis up as an example of immoral inhumanity? Unless I miss the point and it has now become a crime to say anything nasty to a Jew full stop? Once the victim, always the victim, perhaps?

Anyway, I still have no computer after becoming the victim of some technophilic theif two weeks ago. I've been looking for a new one today and I think I might go for the Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo A1167G. I miss downloading random music too much to go without one again. Anybody know anything about laptops that might want to give me some advice?

For Neither Love Nor Money

My! It's an expensive business this Valentine's malarky, isn't it? Treating your baby right certainly don't come cheap these days. Being and Australian I'm sure the wife would be quite content with a tin of Castlemaine and a few barbied shrimps but, as a thoroughly indoctrinated consumerist, I can only ever see the failure to spend sums approaching the GDP of a small country as some sort of dereliction of duty and possibly much akin to a kick in the teeth.

I had decided that that it might be nice to take in a show; it's bloody lucky then that I have the same zeal for economising as Elton John and the Aga Khan put together. One hundred smackers for two seats to see the Producers. Not even the best seats either, but suspended ectopically in the grand circle. No doubt I'll require the Hubble telescope and an ear trumpet to follow the action of the ants on stage.

I also had the bright idea of cooking a dinner for beforehand. I consulted Hell's Kitchen, the cookbook by Gordon Ramsey bought for me as a Christmas present. I quickly learnt leafing trough the glossy pages that the bad-boy of haute cuisine had decided not to limit the scope of his counsels to the art of stuffing a goose and the likes. Oh no, Gordon had far greater pearls of wisdom to impart than basting techniques. One of the culinary sage's little off-topic gems is that nobody ought to sleep more than 4 hours a day. Now, quite frankly, if even the remotest of possibilities exists that Ramsey's leathery fass might in some way be the result of those self-imposed deprivations of beauty sleep, then that should be suffiscient to warn even the most naif ingenu off choosing this role model. For God's sake, the the man is only 39 and yet the skin on his face looks like it wouldn't be out of place on the backside of a particularly sun-exposed rhinoceros. Forget the Grand Canyon, why not take a day trip down any one of the cavernous ravines that cover Ramsey's crumpled facha? I mean, does he really think that it's his verbal onslaughts that people are winching away from when he gets all up-close and personal? I think not.

Thankfully his sirloin of beef with roasted charlotte potatoes and and red wine shallots looked a damn sight better than he did, and so I opted to serve that one. Still, not something for the financially light hearted with the ingredients weighing in at a lean £60. Then again, what price love, I ask you?...and as you can see love and good-will is something that I'm just bursting to give.

Outrage Perpetrated Against Venial Sinner!

They came in through the window. At first glance the only sign that there had been anybody there at all was my absent laptop and an upturned house plant smashed on the floor beneath their entrance point. A more thorough search revealed that they had made their gettaway additionally burdened by my digital camera and, rather ludicrously, around £50 in copper that the Pink Psychiatrist and I had been hoarding in our respective boudoirs. My initial reaction to this outrage: that same flat dysphoria that I had felt all those years ago in a back street of Camberwell after a particularly comical knife-point mugging. None of this wild, inconsolable grief; no murderous bloodlust for vengence; not even a whimpering exclamation of indignation: just a simple, recognizant "oh." and the immediate desire to have done with the whole inconevient business of reporting it before I'd even begun.

The police were very efficient. I wasn't even sure if one called 999 for this sort of thing; it didn't particularly seem to be that much of an emergency, to be frank. Two genial officers of the law arrived promptly and managed, to their credit, a half-decent job of suppressing their what-do-you-expect smiles as they catalogued our stupidity: door not dead-locked; window left ajar; alarm not set; possessions not insured. I thought perhaps I might lighten the uncomfortablely official atmosphere by assuring them with a wry smile that now that the horse had bolted I would definately ensure that the stable door was not only closed but dead locked and alarmed as well. This went down life a pork chop at a bar mitzvah and I decided the simple facts would probably be best.

Later some lady turned up with what looked suspiciously like her personal make-up kit to dust things for prints and the like. I showed her in and left her in peace to get on with this little exercise in futility whilst I consulted the Daily Fascist, er I mean Mail, to put together my own photofit of the criminal at large. I learnt firstly that it was undoubtedly young and a he. Young because - as any decent, tax-paying, Daily Mail reader knows - the younth of today are, without exception, a riotous bunch of amoral ruffians who trawl the streets in hoods looking for old grannies to rape or war veterans to disrespect. They don't even speak proper English, but some incomprehensible pidgen called 'txt'. It must have been a he because the female-species of criminel - a.k.a. the single mother in Daily Mail speak - is known to keep her pecuniary trespasses on a State-wide, rather than a personnal, level in the form of benefit fraud...or even just benifits full stop. He will undoubtedly be involved in drugs, perhaps even the really hard stuff like cannabis, which we know will turn even the most proper of individuals into ravernous, robbing rapists at the slightest whiff. Worse still he is probably an illegal immigrant that has escaped from one of those nice holiday camps by the sea that those moaning, woolly liberals keep stupidly comparing to prisons! As for the colour of his skin, it's more difficult to be sure these days. Time was you could be almost certain that it would have been black; these days one discerns a certain lighter, more olive hue to the modern ne'er-do-well. Satorially, this criminal master of disguises has swapped his overly-baggy jeans and visible underpants for a beard and turban. Lord knows, he may even have a had a hook for a hand to help him scale the wall to the window! If only that poor forensics lady knew about the Daily Mail Bureau for Criminal Statistics, she could have saved herself a whole lot of time and powder by immediately arresting the man below.

Of course, all this still leaves the The Venial Sinner sans computer and, thus, sans means of updating this literary opus of mine. Somehow, however, I think the world might just manage without me...

The End Cometh!

Thank the Lord! In 3 hours and 30 minutes I am released from the gruelling physical and psychological torture that is a week of nights. I shall burst forth onto the London streets and roll about them drunk with freedom. There will be sunlight. There will be flowers. There will be polite society with which to mingle!

Actually, fuck polite society! It's that very impolite society of the London drinking dens and meat markets that I crave now. To rejoin the endless saturnalia of those plastic poofs that swarm about the city centre on the prowl for a trick. Or to sway in dark and seedy rooms cloaked in bland and featureless buildings, intoxicated by the smell of sweat and sex and the hypnotic rhythms of an insistent bassline. Eyes darting; ever-alert, ever-moving, never-staring. Seething animal instinct beneath a rapidly-thinning veneer of respectability. The art of being disinterestedly interested.

No more clerking. No more Venflons. No more bleep bleep bleep of that stupid black box. No more sickness and dread at the thought of going back to my prison. No more.

A week of freedom is almost mine and fuck will I enjoy it!

From A Distance...

Sometimes on nights I have the feeling of inhabiting another place. Not a parallel universe so much, but some other imperceptible dimension, superimposed on that of the everyday world like a sheet of acetate on some pretty picture. My life is split between the dual confinements of my darkened bedroom and the eerily-quiet hollows of the hospital at night. My only glimpse of the outside world is from the grimy window of the bus I take to work each evening and home again in the morning. I speak to no-one. I am like a ghost that is compelled to relive some fatal journey in ever-repeating solitude amidst the insensible crowds.

It is no small surprise then that, from such a detached vantage point, I have watched the unfolding drama of the Muhammed cartoons with a growing sense of perplexity and fear. Has the world gone completely mad in the 6 days I have so far spent in isolation? Surely it must. For how else can I explain the rabid reaction that has greeted the publication of several cartoons which depict the prophet Muhammed in various terrorist poses? Are not there embassies being burned to the ground because of it? Are not there threats against the lives of those responsible issued daily? Are not there people baying for blood, clamouring for their pound of flesh?

I do not deny that the cartoons were provocative. Indeed, at a time when many people are working hard to save the everyday Muslim populace from becoming the victim of overly-facile ideological links between them and the various terrorist attrocities comitted in the name of their religion, it is quite probable that they were even rather ill-advised. The fallout, however, has been out of all proportion to the actual insult. The right to freedom of speech is paramount. That includes the right challenge others over their views and actions. If people have a problem with the cartoons, then they are free to raise their objections peacefully. They may debate. They may argue. These are the acceptable means of protest. Burning embassies to the ground and calling for the assassination of the author are not. The cartoons seem to insinute that Muslim and terrorist are one and the same. That is clearly wrong and deserves to have been challenged. However, by enagaging in this orgy of violence, which increasingly seems to have snowballed out of control, these people do nothing to help dispell the inaccurate image that they claim to be the source of their grievences.

I cannot help but be worried by the seeming sacrifice of our secular liberal rights on the altar of religious absolutism, be it of a Christian or Muslim flavour. I have said it before and I will say it again: there is no good reason why we ought to shy away from questioning somebody's religious beliefs. They are but ideas and should be open to challenge like any other. If the current trend toward religion becoming an off-limits topic continues unchallenged, we will have unwittingly transformed it into some sort of state-sponsored dogma.

Knight's Move Thinking

One of the nice things about nights is you have the time to chat to your patients. Take for example this bemusing exchange that I just had with a man who looked not unlike a cross between dungeon master and a malevolent Paul Danniels.

"Hello, Sir. How are you doing?"
"I piss myself every 10 minutes with fear but you know that already, don't you"
"I'm sorry - what was that?"
"Oh yeah, that's right - going to pretend you don't now know, are you?"
"Know what, Sir?
"That they're threatening me, just like you are now."
"Who's threatening you?"
"The man who wasn't there just then"
"Wasn't where? Why do you think I'm threatening you? We're just chatting."
"I don't know why you're like that. You're all like that. I'll draw attention to the earlier incident if they try to bill me"
"Bill you? What for? What earlier incident?"
"He wasn't happy when he found that that they'd got my glasses in their locker but none of them was billed for it!"
"I think you're a bit confused, Sir - do you know where you are?"
"Yes, Tibet. I'm in Tibet every Thursday"
"Tibet?"
"Yes...or Surrey."
"Right. Maybe you should get some sleep."
"I would if that man that wasn't there just now would stop trying to scare me to death. I know what you're about in here. But then so do you. You know everything that's gone on. I shouldn't be surprised if you're behind it all."
"I'm a doctor. We look after sick patients here. This is a ward full of sick patients, like yourself."
"Well I supposed that's what you tell people on the outside. Luckily I notified my lawyer and if anything happens to me, he knows to take it all the way to the top."

At this point I'd had my fill of this lunacy and ordered that lashing and lashings of haloperidol - that great soother of agitated minds - should be injected deep into his left buttock.

The End.

The Witching Hour

Ah, nights - ya gotta love 'em!

Well, actually you don't. They're shit. I am but half way through my punishment and I've already had enough. Here in the rarified surroundings of my hallowed institution, we get to cover both neurosciences and neurosurgery at night. One can only imagine how thrilled the patients, their famillies and attendant lawyers would be to learn that the doctor looking after them doesn't know a monkey's fuck about what has or is about to happen to them. By now I've given up trying to delicately bat away questions about what exactly various surgeries entail and have instead decided that it's far more fun to just make up what I think my happen. Spinal decompression, I explain, is much like loosening your tie and undoing that top button on ya shirt when you've got a headache - it gives the cord a bit more room to breathe, see? Nobody seems to care anyhow.

Most of the work is mundane. Like a machine I process the new admissions, producing beautiful crafted clerkings for elective surgical patients that I know nobody will ever read. What do the surgeons care if vibration sense is decreased in the left leg or there's a hiss of mitral regurg? All they do is drool and dribble over the prospect of fresh flesh to cut. A starved patient with a beating heart and normal bloods will do them just nicely thank you.

Still, there is the odd bit of fun to keep you ticking over. Last night one of the epileptics went crazy. I heard the nurse screaming as I was cannulated some old dear down the corridor. I popped my head round the door just in time to see Cathy being chased into the female bay by a man wearing only white briefs, screaming in Italian and waving his clenched fists around in a murderous rage. In the carnage that ensued we managed to wrestle him to the ground but only after he'd knocked one old dear flying off her commode, sending a river of rancid piss dangerously close to my knees. Somehow he'd managed to bite his tongue and, as he arched his back and writhed under the weight of four burly security guards, blood pouring from the sides of his mouth, alternating between blasphemous Italian and maniacal laughter, I did have the distinct in impression that I might be in a remake of the Exorcist or the like. In the end it took one and a half hours and 50mg of diazepam i.v. to fully exercise his demons, after which he was carried like a limp rag doll and dumped back on his bed to 'sleep it off'. Cathy complained loudly that she needed danger money to do this job and I nodded soothingly and reassured her that diazepam is long-acting. All the same, it beats clerking.