The Runton Diaries

Twenty Twenty Three

Jan 2nd, 2023

Christmas passed off nicely in our tiny corner of the north Norfolk coast. Sid’s interest in astronomy gathered pace after I told him that the stars flash and change colour during the festive season, and he picked up some agricultural experience as a shepherd in a local nativity play. Elsewhere, I thought the King did well in his first Christmas speech. I was still eating dinner when it started, so stood in the doorway to the front room so I could see the telly while leaning back into the dining room to chew when he was off camera, so as not to be disrespectful. At one point the dog acted in a potentially treasonous manner by barking at a wandering horse outside while he was talking, however, I suspect it was a republican horse and in any case King Charles is named after a type of spaniel so I am sure he wouldn’t have minded.

At work, I was able to tell patients that we’d got them a stent for Christmas, but we’ve kept the receipt in case it isn’t the one they wanted, and so forth. This was against the backdrop of the Training Mania outlined here and here, still raging like wildfire to the probable dismay of our Minor Injuries Unit, which deals with burns patients. As a shortlisted candidate, I have to present the school certificates I don’t have to the selection panel on Wednesday. There has been a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing in my quest to find these. Not getting a job because you make a mess of the interview is fair enough, but not getting the interview because your education authority no longer exists and there have been too many Bank Holidays to make alternative provision would be a bit annoying. I’d have to leave and be a social worker instead, and I don’t want to do that because at least when you deal with people in the hospital, there is a chance of them getting better.

The year closed with a blizzard of Star Wars Lego and an afternoon of classic war films with Sid, who thinks Hitler and Darth Vader are the same person. This did not prevent him from raising philosophical questions regarding the nature of good and bad during the Battle of Britain. Struggling to think of a definition that would make sense to someone who has just turned six, I focussed upon the difference between action and intent, which after all is the basis of law in a civilised country. Therefore, the German pilots are doing a bad thing but are not necessarily bad people, and so on. He seemed happy enough with this, pointing out that another way to tell the good guys is that they always play the badpipes, as per the arrival of the 92^nd Highlanders in Waterloo. I agreed that, yes, this is probably true and, thusly armed, we marched into 2023.

Picters:

Main: Badpipers arriving at the battle of Waterloo.

Top inset: Leads, for wearing in the room during procedures.

Lower inset: 05:30, and about to set off on the commute.
Losing A Finger, Part II

Dec 24th, 2022

In our hospital, if you’ve broken a bone or been in an accident, are otherwise ill, or work here, you’re fucked. On the other hand, if it’s parenthood or cancer you’re after, you’re in luck, because the oncology and birthing units are excellent. In fact, midwifery was my first choice of working area, because I like the idea that, as soon as a lady’s contraptions start, you are dealing with two patients – the lady and her lovely new baby. Male midwives are not exactly encouraged, though, which I suppose is why childbirth is so disorganised. In any case, the advantage of working in a disintegrating NHS is that if you keep your wits about you and dodge the worst of the crumbling infrastructure, you can end up wherever you want – and, as mentioned last time, Santa may have provided us with a path through the flaming wreckage to something worth doing, which is very fortuitous indeed.

I work in Radiology, and Radiology is great. I was sold on the idea of working here when, on a pre-employment visit, a recruiting nurse pointed to our unit and said ‘no one really knows what goes on in there’. Now that I do know what goes on in Radiology, I have decided that I, too, would like to earn a living by injecting dye in to people and then taking pictures of their kidneys. Imagine my delight, then, when a Christmas miracle arrived in the form of training to do that exact thing. Yes, there are two years of preliminary training to get through first, but this involves being a mysterious, specialist Radiography nurse, and not a fat, unhappy, normal one. I initially missed the news, because Mr Universally Inept and I were dealing with a patient and consultant who looked like R Kelly and David Bowie respectively, causing us great amusement. I wanted treatment to include a duet of Starman. Anyway. There are four training places up for grabs and, as I am one of only two applicants without a significant learning or behavioural issue, I consider myself to have a fighting chance.

Well, there’s a thing with that. Remarkably, the Inner London Education Authority has lost all academic records for my school, so there is no proof of my pass marks at both English and Maths. I therefore have no way of proving to the University of Derby, who are providing the training, that I have basic literacy and numeracy skills, and that educationally speaking I am a safer bet than the mentally handicapped. There’s no point me waving a Masters Degree in Politics around either, because that’s a Humanities subject, and this is a branch of Science, so it doesn’t count. Also, there are mutterings that the University gets extra funding for special needs students, putting me at a further disadvantage. I don’t believe this, at least not in the rather nasty sense it is implied. I mean, God knows the NHS is a freak show, but still.

One of the reasons I don’t believe this is that, as several of us crowded into our unit’s Bad News room for a Zoom call about the course, I found myself next to Mr Universally Inept. There is a legend in Radiology of a mysterious angry giant whose mighty footsteps cause the masonry to shake and the theatre lights to flicker. This is, in fact, Mr Universally Inept crashing bed-ridden patients into every single door frame and supporting wall along the main corridor in our unit. Everyone’s crashed a patient into something, but it’s usually just one of the cleaners. Not everyone has crashed a patient into a massive static display screen while wheeling them into an operating theatre, causing their procedure to be postponed for several days while a replacement screen is found, and subsequently crashing them into a wall on the way back out, but Mr Universally Inept has. Within ninety seconds of sitting down, he had banged his knee on the desk, struck the monitor with his forehead, dropped his biscuits twice, discovered that a pen had leaked in his pocket and somehow caused his staff door pass to disintegrate. He is a catastrope of a man, and it was like sitting next to some kind of localised natural disaster. I do not think a career in renal surgery is a natural move for him.

Fortunately, one of my more niche duties is proof reading NHS governance for our matron before it goes off to the Department of Work and Pensions. She rather generously describes me as being of ‘the highest integrity’ and that, if I say I have the required qualifications then, as far as she is concerned, I have. She’s on the selection panel too, so I am hoping she will be a useful ally. So keep your fingers crossed if, unlike Mr Universally Inept, you are able to do that without somehow breaking an arm and starting a fire.

In other career news, Sid recently got a Maths Whizz silver award from his school, and is therefore more able to prove his numeracy skills than I am. I would put him forward for the training, but he’s adamant he either wants to be an asteroid and go to space in a rocket, or remain Earth bound and be a ‘cleano winder’ [window cleaner]. Everyone’s aiming for the stars this Yuletide.

Public Service Announcement: We are shortly off to church for carols, followed by fish and chips and present wrapping. it seems statistically unlikely that you’re dashing through the snow in one whore’s open sleigh to the same carol service as us, so I shall instead take this opportunity to wish you a Merry Very Christmas, wheresoever in the Empire you may be, and a happy and healthy New Year.

Picters:

Main: One of these people is my old dear as a teenager, in a dockyard drawing office.

Top inset: A hospital staircase of my acquaintance.

Lower inset: At least the dog’s comfy.
Losing A Finger, Part I

Dec 22nd, 2022

It’s Christmas, so that’s lovely. I’ve had Paul McBeatle’s Mull of Kintyre on heavy rotation while walking the dog, as it is my favourite Christmas song despite being about glens and heather in Scotland. Actually, I wonder how many Scottish couples called Glen and Heather there are? Loads, probably. And don’t believe the hype: even though Scotland likes to present itself as a big cold field where bitter people live, this isn’t true. It is a beautiful place full of brilliant people, and I think they should play to that aspect far more. Yes, if they’d got independence they would’ve wasted all their tax revenue changing the name from ‘Scotland’ to ‘Not England’, as not being England is the most important thing in the world to a major international player like Scotland, but still. Even if you’re Scottish, it’s Christmas. It’s even Christmas at my hospital, where everything’s covered in tinsel and the corridors are knee deep in Cadbury’s Heroes, which makes moving patients around tricky. I’ve been substituting prosecco for lidocaine to cheer them up during surgery, though, so all’s right with the world.

It’s probably worth pointing out that I am not a nurse. As I may have explained before, I’m not even a trainee nurse. Myself and my fellow dogsbodies are, essentially, trainee trainee nurses. We are obliged to do a lot of nurse stuff, because there aren’t any actual nurses, and there aren’t any actual nurses because being an actual nurse is horrible. To their credit, they try to put you off a career in nursing by being overweight, depressed and obsessed with cats, which sends a pretty clear signal. I often imagine that when they leave college, nurses are given a special advent calendar with a window for every day until they retire, and behind each window, as the years grind past, is a little chart to record their increasing disappointment with life. As you can probably imagine, this puts those of us working towards actually being nurses in a bit of a quandary because, as far as our training and exams go, success would be a disaster.

I explained the horror I feel about this at a recent ‘Hey! How’s it going?’ meeting my fellow cannon fodder and I had with a sympathetic consultant. On this occasion, we were talking with Dr Bowler, who I think we met last time. I am fond of Dr Bowler, as he addresses everyone as ‘chaps’ and ‘Dear boy’ and habitually wears a sheepskin flying jacket. As I once remarked to him, my dissertation was on the British Commonwealth in World War Two, so to work with someone who appears to be a Spitfire pilot is very exciting. Then again, it can be a strain on hospital infrastructure as he sometimes comes to work in a Lancaster bomber, which takes up forty-seven parking spaces, and so on.

Anyway. Looking back, when asked our opinions upon our training and eventual destination, I may have been channelling Tom Hardy’s portrayal of Reggie Kray in the pub fight scene from Legend. This is because I found myself saying ‘I’ll tell you all about being a nurse. Fuck being a nurse, and fuck nursing. Fuck oncology and gynaecology and the other ologies. Fuck main theatres, fuck wearing scrubs and fuck fucking about all day with fucking syringes. In fact, I would rather lose a fucking finger than be a fucking nurse.’

Channelling Reggie Kray or not, it was felt by my fellow dogsbodies that this explained our position adequately. It was unclear what someone who appeared to have spent a long morning dog-fighting with the Hun would do about this but, as it turned out, there was good news on the horizon. Or bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, if you will. (NB Germans aren’t allowed to have Christmas because they don’t deserve it).

Picters:

Main: Joe in the glamourous Compleat Angler by Norwich station recently.

Top inset: I recently attempted to get Sid to eat more vegetables by hiding garden peas in his birthday cake. He spotted them, unfortunately, but thought it was quite a larf.

Lower inset: A Christmas tribute to the late Queen, who Sid thinks flew a ‘Spitflier’ during this summer’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.
In The Room With Dr Bowler

Dec 11th, 2022

Imagine an invisible, invincible snail. We’ve all done this I’m sure, but this particular snail is also intelligent and highly motivated. It’s not the speediest thing in the world, no, but it knows where you are and is out to get you. If it touches you, you suffer a month-long, agonising death which no amount of drugs can alleviate. You won’t be able to sleep or anything. It will be an absolute shocker. On the plus side, you can have £100,000,000 and full diplomatic immunity now if you take up the challenge of living the rest of your life knowing it’s out there, plotting and scheming. You can’t wear salt infused clothing so the snail shrivels up if it gets you – my suggestion – because, as outlined in the legal jargon, it is invincible. You could move to a small island because snails can’t swim, as suggested by the scrub nurse (this conversation was taking place during a leg amputation), but there is always the chance it would smuggle itself in with your supplies because, as stated, it is quite a wily snail.

After some debate, it was concluded that the only hope, really, was for someone to inadvertently trap it somewhere, although even then it might be able to teleport somehow. Also, you wouldn’t know it had been trapped so would still have the psychological pressure driving you ever-closer to paranoid madness. For this reason and others, I declined the challenge as unwinnable, and this was the prevailing opinion by the time I lifted the unattached but surprisingly heavy and bendy leg from the table and put it carefully in the Limb Bin, although our anaesthetist was requesting clarification on the teleportation clause before committing either way.

If you don’t fancy the invisible snail challenge, but would still find £100,000,000 and full diplomatic immunity for life useful, you could seduce a colleague for the same reward. They have to be a colleague you work with often, if not daily, but you can’t just have a go on them, because there has to be an element of romance. ‘You have to woo them a bit before you put it in’, as Dr Bowler, the presiding consultant surgeon, expressly stated. You can’t open a new unit and employ your partner, as was suggested by the head end nurse, because you’ve already seduced them. Also, because of unspecified but severe penalties – agonising death again, probably, which also happens if you fail to seduce anyone – the other person can’t know about the challenge. How or if you explain £100,000,000 and diplomatic immunity to your existing partner and whatnot if you win is up to you. For this reason, it would appear to favour the single employee, but generally seems more reasonable and at least you might get a bit.

I did spot a flaw, however: if you put the work in romancing a colleague, but then get blown out, it’s likely that everyone would be talking about it, no matter how secret you’d tried to keep things. This makes moving onto a secondary target harder, because you might come across as a bit needy, which won’t help. We were able to consider this fully during a tibial angioplasty, as they take about an hour. I think you could mitigate the ‘needy’ aspect by adopting a ‘I’ve been hurt so many times before’ routine for a mercy shag, which I think, legally, would qualify as woo-ing. It was pointed out by the imaging matron that our hospital does have a legal team, and that perhaps we should ask them. Anyway. I was almost barred from entering when it was suggested that my new role as Wellbeing Officer would count as insider trading, on the grounds that I might be privy to information about lonelier and/or unhappier members of staff. I countered by pointing out that there are literally no happy nurses, no matter how many cats and Cadbury’s Heroes you give them, and that anyway my counselling technique would just consist of saying ‘And how did that make you feel? Are you able to talk about that?’ while handing over even more cats and Cadbury’s Heroes, and that it was therefore an invalid objection.

Still, if you think you’re up for either of these challenges, I believe Dr Bowler and myself are back in Main Theatres over Christmas and New Year, so along with the rest of the team we’ll be able to answer any further questions then. The closing date for applications is January 9th, 2023.

Photards:

Main: Part of the regular dog walk.

Top inset: Another part of the regular dog walk, with the winter sun looking nice.

Lower inset: Not Christmas until these two old friends turn up.
Rock Climbing With The School Bully, Part V: A Score Settled

Dec 6th, 2022

Public Service Announcement: I was for several years a trader at Camden, Spitalfields and Greenwich markets, to add context to the following post. There is an old 300,000 word blog dealing with that, but I have mislaid it for the time being.

Unless you are trying to see how far you can slide in your socks – which in my part of the NHS we do quite often – you never run along a hospital corridor. The trick to getting around efficiently is to walk fast-slow, so as not to disconcert patients, while maintaining your hospital voice. Sid’s interpretation of me doing this involves charging around the front room shouting ‘CALM DOWN MY NAME IS PAUL WHEN DID YOU LAST EAT?’, and this is a reasonable approximation. On rare occasions, however, there is a need to ‘walk, but run’. Basically, this means jogging, but it’s over-dramatic, even if I sense there are some staff whose entire reason for joining the medical profession in the first place is, one day, to run along a corridor doing this exact thing. Dicks.

That said, there are times when no amount of jogging, calming down, dietary enquiry or explaining what my name is will change an outcome, as was the case recently with a Stoke City fan. He was an entirely likeable man, cheerfully and calmly accepting his deteriorating situation. In fact, so admirable was his stoic manliness that, as a result of speaking with him, I no longer want to kill former Stoke midfielder Chris Kamara, proof that your opinions about people can change. In case you are unfamiliar, Kamara broke West Ham striker Frank McAvennie’s leg some years ago, and the refrain Kill Kamara! echoed around Upton Park for the rest of the season. It echoes still, in faded spray paint, along the less frequented alleys and burger vans of E13 – a haunting reminder of a happier time. It also lingers in north Norfolk, where I once delighted my current girlfriend and startled our dozing son by yelling it when I discovered him reading the CBeebies bedtime story, but perhaps it is time to move on. As I explained to the Stoke City fan, if Frank McAvennie is allowed to break Chris Kamara’s leg in return, I am finally prepared to draw a line under the episode.

(Incidentally, at around the same time, former Liverpool and England stalwart Emlyn Hughes publicly criticised West Ham in the tabloids. Disaffection among fans was transmitted in a blunt refrain set to the tune of When The Saints Go Marching In and utilising the ‘call and response’ method most closely associated with the gospel music of the Deep South, replacing the line ‘I want to be in that number’ with ‘He’s gonna die, die and die’. Emlyn Hughes did actually die, twenty-four years later, of a brain tumour, so the song proved to be chillingly accurate.)

My opinions on Nat Baker haven’t changed much since he stole my Minstrels, but I occasionally wonder what might have come to pass if I’d just stabbed him in the fucking face when we were children and had done with it. Perhaps he might have avoided a subsequent life of crime, culminating in an arrest in a Honda Passat containing half a million pounds’ worth of Ecstasy, for which he received eight years in Belmarsh and, presumably, lost his driving licence. When in Belmarsh – ‘a local nick, for local people’ – with my old Camden co-trader Plastic Dave he discovered a flair for kitchen work. Had he not done this, he may not have acquired Abra Kebabra in Turnpike Lane upon his release, buying salad wholesale from Greenwich Market trader Fruity Eddie, whose sister he subsequently married. His kebab shop was great, and did the magic combo of kebabs and chip shop chips, so perhaps not stabbing him was a positive move, after all. As I have explained to him since, I could slash away like a combine harvester these days and never hit an artery, such is his tremendous fatness. Ah well. Perhaps this, perhaps that.

Not that we had any contact before Fruity Eddie recommended me as a source of kitchenware for the six outlets he and Mrs Baker went on to own across north and west London, as Eddie and I were both trading at Greenwich Market at the time. Had this not happened, I would never subsequently have been re-acquainted with Nat in the now-demolished Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1, and a deal between us would never have been struck, with my insistence upon a catering sized bag of Minstrels and a vinyl copy of Don’t Mess With My Toot Toot by Denise LaSalle thrown in for a larf. Subsequently, I would not have had care labels with ‘Enormous Thieving Wanker’ attached to the inside neck hem of sixty bleach-resistant poly-cotton bib aprons with adjustable halter and anti-tangle ties. Above all, though, I would never have been in happy receipt of cash payment for the same and, while pondering what to do with it, received a call from Mrs Baker about swear words in her aprons. I assured her that there was no need to worry because, although foul language around food was unprofessional, it was perfectly hygienic, and embraced the warm and calming sensation of justice finally done.

Picters:

Main: Abra Kebabra in, I think, Croydon. This is an actual chain in Ireland, so I am not sure how it all works with copyright and whatnot. In any case, the last I heard, Nat had sold the business, so who knows.

Top: Chris Kamara, still alive and everything.

Lower: Writing important things on my arms in Main Theatres, as always.