Recently in Person Category

We got back from France late on Saturday. It had been quite a trip - eighteen hours door to door, taking in four demonstrations, two trains, a ranting taxi driver and every French football fan on the planet ("this is like Beirut" said Mr Twinky) squeezed into an eight foot square area, and a departure lounge with eighteen children under ten playing hide and seek.

So we were tired.

It had been a good holiday. We had eaten well, we'd seen some art, been rained on and hailed at, we'd driven around a couple of industrial estates, and we'd stayed in an ice-box up a dark muddy lane near the water treatment plant fifteen minutes walk from the only village in Brittany that has absolutely no charm. We'd had one day where the absolute highlight was driving through a puddle. Quite fast.

So it was only natural that within an hour of getting home one of our radiators exploded a bit, leading us to spend half the night with sandbags and saucepans building dikes and dams to stop the flow of special radiator water, to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality, and to soak up anything that escaped.

The flat's quite cold now.

Because I'm not feeling great, I will probably go to see a doctor at lunch time.

In the past, my experience with doctors hasn't been great. They have tended to treat me as something to process, a bag of symptoms rather than a person. Which, I guess is part of their job. It wouldn't really do if they were spending all day with sick people, would it, as it would drive them insane, wouldn't it? Or at the very least push them towards clinical depression.

There have been notable exceptions. The Australian doctor that I went to in Foreign was very good, relaxing and personable, although she did have a tendency to reel off lists of chemicals and tell me where I was deficient or over-compensating. And older doctors are worse than younger doctors. Older doctors make me feel like I am wasting their time, when they could be treating sick people.

Don't get me started on dentists. Dentists are worse. They try to tell you that you are a bad person, they cause pain, they put on rubber gloves and poke about in your mouth, leaving behind small fragments of tartar that stay around for weeks, and then they charge a small fortune for it.

Sod it, I'm going to the pharmacist instead.

In other news, a London Police Box has been spotted on the streets of Cardiff.