Modern Day Nursery Rhymes

Number One - The NHS is Falling Down (music here)

The NHS is falling down,
Falling down, falling down.
The NHS is falling down,
My fair Patricia!

How shall we build it up again,
Up again, up again?
How shall we build it up again,
My fair Patricia!

Build it up with spin and lies,
Spin and lies, spin and lies.
Build it up with spin and lies,
My fair Patricia!

Spin and lies will wash away,
Wash away, wash away.
Spin and lies will wash away,
My fair Patricia!

Build it up with P. F. I.,
P. F. I., P. F. I..
Build it up with P. F. I.,
My fair Patricia!

P. F. I. will cost a bomb,
Cost a bomb, cost a bomb.
P. F. I. will cost a bomb,
My fair Patricia!

Build it up with management,
Management, management.
Build it up with management,
My fair Patricia!

Management will make it worse,
Make it worse, make it worse.
Management will make it worse,
My fair Patricia!

Build it up with silver and gold,
Silver and gold, silver and gold.
Build it up with silver and gold,
My fair Patricia

Silver and gold will be eaten up,
Eaten up, eaten up.
Silver and gold will be eaten up,
My fair Patricia

Sack the doctors - they won't fight,
They won't fight, they won't fight!
Sack the doctors - they won't fight,
My fair Patricia!

Suppose the patients might complain,
Might complain, might complain?
Suppose the patients might complain,
My fair Patricia!

Then blame everybody else in sight,
Else in sight, else in sight!
Blame the Torys and the Right,
Myyyy Faaaaaair Patriciaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

By The Venial Sinner (original nursery rhyme here)

Mardy Bum

I got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning. I looked in the mirror and thought: “Jeez, what the fuck happened there!?” After half an hour of trying to rearrange my face and my hair into a vaguely passable shape, I gave up and stumbled out of the door into the harsh winter light. I arrived at the end of the road just in time to watch both of the buses I needed to catch to work speed away from stop. As I waited in the perishing cold, it started to rain and I felt a silent hate for this particular day fill my gut.

I tried to comfort myself in the knowledge that only one lumbar puncture then a brief teaching session for the medical students stood between me and the return to my bed. I was none too impressed when the Health Care Assistant told me in her toneless, monosyballic pigeon that “patient not on ward. Gone x-ray”. In fact I knew she was to go to neurophysiology to have her evoked potentials checked but I’ve long since decided that further interrogating a HCA is much like asking the speaking clock the meaning of life: once they have passed on to you whatever nugget they’ve been programmed to say, any attempts to extract more information will only result in repetition. Still, I’d thought she’d be back from neurofizz by now. I decided to set up the trolley in expectation but only succeeded in demonstrating how highly strung I was to the rest of the ward by having a hissy fit over the lack of brown sterilization fluid. “No, the blue stuff will not do!”, I explained through gritted teeth, “I know it does the same thing but I always use the brown and I’m not changing now!”. In the end, the poor HCA had to be reprogrammed to fetch some from another ward. Then I waited…and waited……and waited!

By the time the patient arrived back at 12pm, I was seething inwardly with quiet rage. “No, you cannot have lunch, I’m afraid – I’m very busy and I can only do this now”, I lied. In retrospect I wonder if divine retribution might not really exist because it was at this point that everything just got worse. I tried to open the one of those ridiculous glass vials of local anaesthetic and nearly sliced the end of my index finger off when it decided to disintegrate in my hands. Having just warned her that the anaesthetic would sting a bit and not to move, I began to inject, at which point she immediately wriggled of the end of the needle in discomfort, sending a jet of lignocaine up her back. I felt my eyebrows ascend to such heights that they were in serious danger of leaving my face. When she repeated this trick later on, it had even more spectacular results: the barrel of the syringe came off the needle while I was pushing with all my might so that the lignocaine exploded all over my face and eyes. Needless to say I was none too impressed.

By the time I got back to the ward, still clutching the samples because – like everything else in my shithole of an institution – the label printer was on the blink, my medical students were already waiting for me. I remember the first time me and one of the other SHOs, The English Rose, had gone to meet our students. When I saw the geeks that I had been lumbered with and compared them to the rather tasty grouping that The English Rose had got, I suddenly had a bad case of student envy. Whereas I'd got an assortment of spotty nerds, she'd got the chiselled cool kids. It's much the same feeling as when you order at a restaurant and your friend’s choice arrives looking simply exquisite whilst yours looks like something the dog might quite reasonably turn its nose up at. I decided that the only way to make myself feel better about this day was to take it all out on my hapless students by ridiculing them mercilessly. Esoteric medical trivia that I had only learnt the other day I dressed up as common knowledge that even my ganny would know. And yes, I did feel better as I watched that blotchy, red rash of nervousness spread across their faces. "How can you not recognise a case of Wallenberg's syndrome when you see it? And how soon did you say the exams were again?" I greeted their answer with a long sucking noise through my teeth to indicate my lack of faith in their ability to make it. Cruel, I know, but in a dog eat dog world, you’ve gotta be out for number 1.

Maybe tomorrow I'll try the other side of the bed: I think, in the long run, it might be better for my karma.

Tempus Fugit (Et Nos Fugimus In Illus?)

The realities thrusts in your face from time to time by life are not always palatable. Indeed, sometimes they have all the appeal of a steaming turd. For some time now I have been haunted by the recurrent thought that, in all probability, my life will be of absolutely no consequence whatsoever in the grand scheme of things.

I will live, I will love, I will work and I will die; but after that is all done and dusted, nothing will remain. There will be nothing that will endure; nothing that will survive me; no scar on the face of posterity that people might contemplate long after its creator has ceased to be. Nothing that is either of me, from me or because of me shall remain. Nothing.

This is the possibility that I most fear and, moreover, a possibility that, with each passing moment that I fail to do anything of any lasting consequence, becomes just that little bit more real. It is the burgeoning reality slowly shaped by the action of continuously passing time on the great hunk of hypothetical possibility that was my life at birth. When all the flimsy, sandstone frivolities of my existence have been washed away in the streams of history, what will remain? Could there be a hard core of strong and sturdy stuff somewhere with in me that might resist, that might persist, and that might even change the direction of the flow, if only by a fraction of a degree? Probably not, but surely it must be everybody’s dream.

I remember reading about Rousseau and the ideas that he set down in his Social Contract. Rousseau was already dead when his war cry against oppression gave birth to a mutant child – the French revolution. It was a revolution that tore through the status quo and irreparably altered our beliefs about power and its exercise. It will not be forgotten – for better or for worse – and nor will Rousseau. His big idea gave him a form of immortality; in reality, probably the only form that is really open to any human being.

As I flit from blog to blog – like a fly flitting from wall to wall – sampling each little world before moving on, I feel overawed by what I find. I see such a frenzy of creative energy everywhere. I see people crafting beautiful stories, left to float in cyberspace for others to chance upon by happy accident. Moments in peoples’ lives crystallized and annotated for others to explore. I see people sharing thoughts and observations on the world around them and, in so doing, asking important and incisive questions about why it should be ordered in this, and not some other, way. I see people striving to find a big idea, like Rousseau's, that will make things better and joining forces with others to help them find their way intellectually. It’s an amazing thing to be allowed to watch and, indeed, even participate in.

Nonetheless, I can’t help feeling a little depressed when I see how gracefully and concisely some other people are capable of expressing their thoughts. I read about a American soldier dealing with the reality of his loved-one leaving for war and being overwhelmed by the possibility that he may not return. I thought it was beautiful. And I knew I would not be capable of writing anything like it. I couldn’t help but wonder how long it would endure for as an idea in the ether of the internet, waiting for somebody else to find it. Could it outlast its author, hidden on some server somewhere, only resurface to affect some other, unsuspecting else? I honestly have no idea. OK, so it wasn’t an idea that was going to change the world or spawn a revolution, but what does that really matter in the end? As long as we leave some mark, any mark, then perhaps we have had our little victory over time, even if it will always win the war.

A Brave New World

Thank the Lord that we English doctors had the time and resources to waste treating Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in August of 2004 when he was flown over to London for angioplasty at the governement's expense. The frail 74 year-old man who underwent a triple-bypass operation has been held up as the poster boy of a democratised, post-war Iraq not just by various real political commentators, but also by fat boy, homo journalist Johann Hari. Hari does at least point out that his new best friend "has views on social issues that, to a Western leftie, are (at best) distasteful. He is critical of divorce and he certainly isn't going to be joining any Gay Pride parades. But he believes in opening up a democratic space in which these ideas can be discussed."

No gay pride parades? Bit of an understatement some might say. On his own website, Al -sistani calls for the killing of homosexuals in "the worst, most severe way". For those, like myself, who can't read arabic, question 5 under 'lewat' (homosexual) asks "what is the judgement for sodomy and lesbianism?". The answer is clear: "Forbibben. Punished. In fact, killed. The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing."

Exiled Iraqi Ali Hili, who heads up the LGBT UK Abu Nawas group is also unimpressed with Hari's taste in friends. He wants people to know about the Badr Corps and their activities in Iraq. He claims that "the Badr Corps is in fact nothing more than the military wing of Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution", which views Al-Sistani as its main spiritual leader. Badr has fronted a witch-hunt of lesbians and gays, using a network of informers who target immoral behaviour. "They kill gays, unveiled women, prostitutes, people who sell or drink alcohol, and those who listen to western music and wear western fashions. Badr militants are entrapping gay men via internet chat rooms. They arrange a date, and then beat and kill the victim."

Sounds fun, eh? Maybe not quite what you were expecting when you ordered out on Gaydar. Haydar Faiek, aged 40, a transsexual Iraqi, was beaten and burned to death by Badr militias in the main street in the Al-Karada district of Baghdad in September 2005. Sarmad and Khalid were partners who lived in the Al-Jameha area of Baghdad. Persons unknown revealed their same-sex relationship. They were abducted by the Badr organisation in April 2005. Their bodies were found two months later, in June, bound, blindfolded and shot in the back of the head

And they say that this is the best hope for Iraq?iraqhomophobiagayal-sistanimurder

Music To My Ears

I'm having a fairly cultured week for once, it must be said. On Monday night I decided to dump my pre-planned evening in front of BBC4's Fantabulosa to join my friends in their trip to see the Shortwave Set play. I met Monobrow and Lady Muck at 7pm sharp in the backwater village of Shepherd's bush, which also conveniently doubles as the Australian National Homeland. They had both bought the album beforehand and, as newly converted disciples, immediately set to prosletysing for my conversion. I decided to reserve my judgement all the same. The support acts were varied: the first - called Cherry Ghost, I think - were a refreshingly uncool, Johnny-Cash-esque three-piece that I rather liked; the second, whose name failed to make an impression, contented themselves with pumping out some generic loud noise, which impressed nobody but themselves.

As for The Shortwave Set themselves, they were superb. I don't have a big enough musical vocabulary to be able to categorise them or their possible influences with any confidence, but then again perhaps that's for the best as the real clincher for me was their originality and their willingness to experiment. The end product of such imagination is the kinda dreamy, hypnotic currents that underpin tracks such as Your Room, Is It Any Wonder or Roadside. I'll definately be listening out for more in the future!

On Tuesday, The Australian (who does not reside in the National Homeland, coincidentally) had been thoughtful enough to get us tickets for the Guardian debate on the limitations of free speech, entitled 'Free To Offend?'. This is something that I am suffisciently interested in to have written about it twice before on this blog. The debate was chaired by Gary Younge - one of my favourite journalists, who I was shocked to discover is actually the size of a small house - whilst the panel consisted of Ziauddin Sardar, Trevor Philips, DD Guttenplan, Salma Yaqoob, and Will Hutton. They all made some interesting points but the one in particular that stuck in my mind and challenges my relatively absolutist view of the freedom of speech was made by Ziauddin Sardar in relation to power imbalances in the distribution of freedon. He pointed out that if we expect to have the freedom to disregard the sacred values of another culture - for example, as in publishing cartoons that denigrate the image of the prophet Muhammed - then we must accept that another culture has the freedom to disregard the the sacred values of our own - for example, as in the protests against complete freedom of speech. Some poor Indian guy in the audience fell foul of the crowds when he tried to hold up secular India as a model of cultural integration where muslim, hindu, sikh and christian all walk hand-in-hand while the birds sing and the sun shines above. Sadly, he omitted to mention Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the clashes with Muslims over Ayodhya, the destruction of the Babri Masjid, petrol-bombed trains, the Hindu-Christian clashes in Gujarat, or, indeed, the disputes over Kashmir itself, to name but a few. Ooops. A portion of the audience errupted in fury and, if he had any point other than this, then it was lost in the furore. It seems, therefore, that we are free to speak, so long as what we speak is the truth.

Political Philosophy for Poofs

I note with approval the arrival of the new Dolce & Gabbana advertising campaign on the giant Charing Cross road billboard. There’s nothing like swinging round the corner of Oxford street to be confronted by enormous, semi-naked paragons of male beauty. Naturally, they’ve thrown in the odd dolly bird for the amusement of the straight populace but nothing so garish as to distract from the chiseled jaws, ripped abs and olive skin. The purposeful sexual ambiguity is made explicit in the male and female hands both draped over the taught, hairless chest of the modern day Adonis that sprawls across the bottom of the poster.

I would like to stand and look at it for longer, but then I suddenly remember that I have far too few D&G clothing options in my wardrobe and double back on myself in the direction of Bond street. At these moments in life I can only breathe a sigh of relief that I don’t live in Poland. Apparently the country has gone to the dogs; or, to be more exact, it went to the right-wing Law and Justice Party - also known as Prawo i Sprawiedliwość or PiS for short - in the elections of September 2005. In addition, the populist Samoobrona and the extremist and rather sinister-sounding League of Polish Families recently signed a solidarity pact with the amusingly-named PiS party to prop up its minority government. Then again, the party boss, Jaroslaw, and the new president, Lech, couldn’t have a closer relationship, politically, ideologically or genetically: they are monozygotic twins. For the brothers Kaczyński, politics is in the blood.

Not good news for Poland’s homo communities, alas. Lech, in his former role as Mayor of Warsaw, had already made his antipathy towards Polish poofry evident when he refused to authorise a pride parade in June, 2005. When its organisers requested a meeting to discuss the reasons why, he responded that “he was not willing to meet perverts”. Hmmm…a diplomat of the Prince Philip variety there, methinks. They decided to go ahead anyway but, sadly, were met with a hail of rocks, bottles and verbal abuse thrown by young members of Młodzież Wszechpolska, an organisation associated with the League of Polish Families. At least two of the participants required hospitalisation, and several dozen more probably had their new D&G tightie-whitie T-shirts ruined by troublesome blood stains.

Now that Lech, Jaroslaw and the PiS party have been handed the reigns of power, it is clear that we can expect more of the same. They were off to a running start when they abolished the Office of the Government Plenipotentiary for the Equality of Men and Women, which also promoted equality of homosexuals. Now they are suggesting that queers should not be allowed to take up jobs where they would come into contact with children, such as a school teacher. Ah yes, my all time favourite: that wilful lack of distinction between the terms homosexual and paedophile. It’s the year two-thousand and fucking six, we claim to live in a rational, inclusive, cosmopolis, and yet people – and not just people but heads of national governments - are still trotting this one out. It’s just crazy!

Nor are PiS a particularly shy party when it comes to making their opinions known. Jaroslaw told to the Polish weekly Ozon: "The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can't agree to it." Downfall of civilisation, you say? Goodness, sounds bad. Who’d have thought it? You start off by letting two men hold hands in the street and before you know it the whole of mankind is poised to plunge backwards into benighted barbarity. Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, faithful lapdog and trusted Prime Minister of the brothers Kaczyński, confirmed that he was ‘on message’ when he told Newsweek that homosexuality is "unnatural" and also threatened lesbians and gay men with "state intervention" if they tried to "infect others with their homosexuality." Infect somebody with homosexuality? Gosh, it really throws the worries about Bird Flu into a new light! And ‘state intervention’ – what exactly does that mean? Perhaps history can point us in the direction of the form this might take? Maybe something along the lines of the notorious Hyacinth law enforcement action, which began on November 15, 1985, at the behest of Czeslaw Kiszczak, Internal Affairs Minister of the then-ruling Communist regime? It lasted for two years, during which the police, then called the militsiya, gathered information about some eleven thousand homosexuals, many of which they interrogated and fingerprinted.

Hmmmm, maybe I’ll keep Poland off my list of potential holiday destinations just for the moment. It’s terrible shame really: I hear they have such great vodka over there...but,unfortunately, absolutely no homoerotic Dolce & Gabbana advertising campaigns. polandhomophobiagayprotest

Hell in a Handcart

Nurses are, as a rule, the strangest of creatures. After a long period of close-up observation of the Gorillas in the Mist variety, I have come to the conclusion that a nurse's personality might come in one of two basic flavours. Either they have all the independence and problem-solving abilities of a 2 month old baby or, alternatively, they are sadistic mini-Hitlers whose sole reason for entering health care was so they could get closer to the misery and suffering that feeds them. Mini-Hitlers tend to be found in high-dependency or intensive care units where they think that just because they know how to look after an arterial line or turn up the PEEP on a ventilator they have mastered all there is to know about medicine and could run the entire unit with their eyes closed. Some mini-Hitlers have been given the freedom to seek out victims for their powerplay all over the hospital: these are the nurse specialists and the site practioners. Only last week I got into a showdown with tissue viability nurse because I refused to start anti-pseudomonal antibiotics on her orders:

"The ulcer's infected with pseudomonas"

"Really? Have micro grown something already."

"No. But I can see that it is. You should start tazocin"

"I think we ought to wait for the swab"

...Stony silence....tumbleweed rolls past...

"I know what pseudomonas looks like and this is pseudomonas."

"All the same..."

And when three swabs in a row came back negative did she apologise? Did she fuck! Nor did mad Sandra with her mad thyrotoxic eyes in her mad hysterical head who kept bleeping me constantly through the night because some chaps blood pressure was either a couple of millimeters too high or a couple of millimeters too low. Don't you understand - I felt like screaming down the phone - I don't fucking care...call me when he's dead! I imagined her index finger blistered and red from hammering out my bleep number every five seconds. Bitch.

Anyway, all that is finished for a little while at least and the weekend beckons. I go into it a little under par unfortunately after a routine drinking session last night got out of control and the Pink Psychiatrist and I ended up swaying glass-eyed on the dance floor of the Shadow Lounge. The Pink Psychiatrist was sufficiently intrigued by a Death-In-Venice style blond waif with a preposterous mountain of thick hair on his head that he forced us to go and talk to him. Unfortunately, he had either had his brain wisked in utero or was on a huge quantity of drugs as nothing he said actually made any sense and his affect was so euphoric as to be pathological. We decided it best to leave Tadzio alone with his hallucinations.

We ended up hitting the sack around 3:30am. I felt sorry for The Pink Psychiatrist when I heard him get up at 7:30am. Medicine is such a cruel task master.

Carnage

This weekend has been spent catching up with old friends. As is the sacred, immutable tradition of time immemorial in England, this re-acquaintance was facilitated by lashings and lashings of alcohol. The clear advantage of getting absolutely hammered is that the entire evening is nothing but a pleasurable blur and nobody need ever think of anything new to say since it will all be forgotten by the morning.

Naturally, there will always be casualties. There can be no pleasure without pain. Friday night was unusually violent though. It was an evening which confirmed to me that, whilst we are all in the gutter and some of us may indeed be looking up at the stars, there is a whole other class that is face down in a puddle of their own vomit. It is to that latter class that my friends and I undoubtedly belong. Having briefly considered such fashionable haunts as Brixton, Clapham and Old Street, we plumped instead for the Weatherspoon's at Elephant and Castle. The Met Bar it was not. Perhaps that wasn't such a bad thing in retrospect. I doubt the staff at the Met Bar would have watched Paulo vomit explosively over himself and the table with an air of such sanguine resignation. Sadly the Stella-Sambuca depth charge had proven to be the straw that broke the camel's back and poor Paulo had to stagger off to the tube station covered in vomit and shame. The remainder made it to the Ministry but by morning the other two had also succumbed to rebellious bellies so that only I had not seen the inside of toilet bowl at close quarters that night. Natural selection, that's all I'll say.

On Saturday, we had cocktails at home to honour the return of Benhamino after so long an absence. This time it was the Pink Psychiatrist who took both barrels of the alcohol gun squarely in the face. In three hours, the three of us munched our way through 1 bottle of vodka, 1 bottle of cointreau, 1/3 bottle of gin, 1/3 a bottle of rum and 1/4 bottle of tequila. The Pink Psychiatrist slipped off to the toilet near the end - ostensibly to put his face on - but after 20 minutes I began to suspect that it was not a natural calling that had summoned him to the bogoir. I found him collapsed by the side of the toilet with dysconjugate eye movements and a distinctly unpleasant pallor. He managed to bounce off the walls into his room before collapsing face down into his bed and lapsing into a stupor. Instinctively I took this to mean that he would not be accompanying us to Heaven after all. Benhamino and I went and had a good time all the same.

Charming weekend. Just a shame they go so fast.

Accidental Overdose

Unfortunately I was unable to attend work on Tuesday. I awoke to find myself in a most deplorable condition. I was exhausted; my body ached from tip to toe; my eyes were swollen and sore; my stomach turning over in open rebellion; my head felt as if it might well cave in at any moment under the pressure of the vice like pain which was only partly assuaged by remaining perfectly still. There could be no doubt about it: I had the mother of all hangovers - but how?

As I slowly reached over to silence the clearly rather ambitiously programmed alarm clock, I began to piece together the preceding evening in fleeting images. Yes, dinner, The Pink Psychiatrist saying we should go out, just a couple naturally, me nodding my acquiescence as I pour the Hoegaarden. Then Retro Bar, pint, pint, two love birds writhing around on the couch opposite, time to go. Next the disconcertingly lit cave of The Friendly Society, jug of beer, cheaper that way, the life coach sidles on up, watching The Pink Psychiatrist bite on his tongue each time he gets called a psychologist, bored of this weirdo, move on. Trashy GAY Bar, packed as usual, all manner of creatures, some so nice, where's the Australian, pint, ah there he is, pint, pint, talk of Heaven, pint, yeah Heaven yeah, the evening is suddenly so young, a taxi to Heaven, let's go!...

It all dissolves into a whirls of coloured lights, staccatos of heady beats and waves of hideous nuasea. I call one of the SHOs, crawl on my belly (literally - as well as metaphorically - to minimise the pain) and beg him to cover my job for the day. The guilt is overpowering, but probably not as overpowering as the smell of stale booze would be were I to go in. He agrees and I crawl back to bed to finish off dying. My back-up radio alarm fades up to an painful volume. It's too far away to turn off. Guy Garvey's melancholic voice fills the room and my mind as he sings through the tumbling chords of Elbow's 'Red':

'You burn,

too bright.

You live,

too fast.

This can't go on too long!

You're a tragedy starting to happen.'

Hmmm. I know then that I'll never, ever drink again...well, at least not until I feel better.