The Runton Diaries

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.
Rock Climbing With The School Bully, Part IV: Marmalisation

Nov 26th, 2022

Public service announcement: I gave up smoking a long time ago.

I mentioned to Sid’s teacher at a recent parents’ evening how pleased I was that there seemed to be an awful lot of fighting at the school, and how this had attracted us to their syllabus in the first place. Despite my current girlfriend telling me to ‘For fuck’s sake shut up’, I pointed out that we’ll be glad of this if he turns out to have a violent career in later life, and that it was illegal to swear in a classroom such as the one we were currently sitting in, on tiny adorable children’s chairs. The conversation drifted a bit after that, eventually turning to a large picture of the late Queen Elizabeth that Sid and his friend Harry Christ had painted. Incidentally, Harry Christ’s name isn’t Harry Christ, but Sid has always maintained that it is, because it sounds similar. Anyway, I doubt Sid’s teacher is going to be particularly fussed about a bit of playground scrapping, as she has a drinker’s face and has probably been about a bit. I’ll ask about her drinking when I see her at the Christmas carol concert, just out of curiousity.

Remarkably, my own school managed to arrange a fight with the Windsor Chapter Hell’s Angels a couple of years prior to the Minstrel stealing episode that we are, at some length, discussing. No, I also don’t believe that this actually happened, either, and I speak as one who believed a classmate’s father was Bungle from Rainbow, as previously discussed. Anyway. My school claimed victory when they did not turn up at the appointed time and place, which I think was Plaistow tube, in the days before it was full of Guardian readers gluing themselves to public transport, obviously. The fact that they probably didn’t want to fight children was of no mind: as a school, we had faced down the Hell’s Angels and, even though the incident can’t possibly be true, we felt it gave us bragging rights.

To return to our story: one of the worst things that could happen prior to having a fight at our school was for a teacher to intercept the combatants on the way to the wall behind which disputes were traditionally settled. If this happened, you were fucked. For a start, there was the legal minefield of liability for lost television revenue. There was also the no-holds-barred surprise lynching you would receive at some unknowable future juncture because you didn’t ‘stand’, and were therefore some sort of wanker. If the contest went ahead you were in the clear, legally speaking, even if you got marmalised, because at least you ‘stood’. Of course, I intended to avoid marmalisation by stabbing Nat with a sharpened compass point because I was of the opinion then, as now, that you either get bullied once, or bullied forever. It was tricky though. We had been, well, not close mates exactly, like Sid and Harry Christ, but on good terms. In fact, Nat taught me to smoke a few years later, and that’s what friends are for.

Thus it was that on an otherwise nondescript school day afternoon behind an anonymous wall at the end of the ninth decade of the twentieth century, Nat Baker and myself readied ourselves for combat. The thing about bringing localised but overwhelming force to a broad-front conflict – the schwerpunkt or ‘blitzkrieg’ doctrine associated with German success in World War Two, for example, or my improvised weapon consisting of a modified technical drawing instrument with which I intended to stab a Tottenham fan who had stolen my Minstrels – is that you only have a short amount of time to use it. A surprise is not a surprise if your opponent knows it’s coming, after all. As far as modified classroom equipment goes, it’s not a surprise at all if your opponent can already see it because it has worn through the pocket of your Farahs, as had happened in my case. This was extremely bad news.

‘You gonna stab me with that?’ said Nat, gesturing towards the compass point.

To this day, I can’t remember exactly what I said to de-escalate the situation. He maintains it was ‘No, I had to measure my bollocks for biology homework’, and this sounds plausible, clutching at straws as I was. In any case, he claimed it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard and, whenever our paths have crossed since, has never failed to mention it. In return, I usually offer to stab him now, if it will shut him up, but have thus far not done so. In any case, peace was restored and, thanks in no small part to all the Superkings which children smoked at the time, tranquility descended once more upon the school. Say what you like about smoking, but it kept a generation of children calm, focussed and slim during the Cold War and AIDS. That said, a liberty had been taken, and I was still a disgruntled plaintiff. I decided that the best thing to do was wait for a quarter of a century before my next move.

Picters:

Main: Sounds nice. This was in Bermondsey or New Cross somewhere, part of a feud between Tottenham and Millwall.

Top: Windsor Chapter Hell’s Angels. Why would people like this want to hang out with children?

Lower: Liver biopsy stuff. This is for four consecutive biopsies; I never set up for more than one at a time because it looks cluttered and untidy unless the patient actually has four livers or has been force fed foie gras style for a larf beforehand.
Rock Climbing With The School Bully, Part III: Life Skills

Nov 22nd, 2022

Public service announcement: For the benefit of foreigners, Minstrels are a British confectionery staple consisting of chocolate in chocolate shell. They are wonderful and if, once my scheduled MRI scan has happened, it turns out that I do indeed have peripheral arterial disease, they will be in no small part responsible. Je ne regrette rein, except not eating more of them.

While acknowledging that we are mid-way through a story of childhood confectionery theft to illustrate a series of connected posts on the theme of bullying to, in turn, highlight the need for the establishment of a new trade union for non-clinical NHS staff, I sometimes wonder if stealing cars is still a thing. It was a national sport when I was growing up, especially in Canning Town. In case you are unfamiliar, this is a part of London where, traditionally, West Ham fans are made. Not now, obviously, as it’s all organic bakeries and Guardian readers and pronouns and what not, but for decades it was wall-to-wall claret and blue and an almost comically criminal place. Well-liked local notables included Mono and his dog Trio, who only had four legs between them, and Frank the Wank, a harmless man with an unfortunate muscular affliction that made him appear to be constantly nursing a tremendous invisible phallus.

The most Canning Town crime ever happened to an acquaintance of mine at some point in the 1990s. He was surveying a roof prior to doing some work or other when he noticed an urchin trying to break into his van, parked below. When the urchin failed to heed shouted warnings and threats, my acquaintance ascended to pavement level and remonstrated with him further. Unmoved, the urchin replied ‘OK mate, what’s happening here is that I am going to steal your van, and you are going to watch me’. With this, he forced the driver’s side door, hot wired the steering column and made good his escape. My acquaintance said that what annoyed him most was that he didn’t even bother to hurtle away in a cloud of screeching tyre smoke, but drove off within the speed limit, stopping at some nearby traffic lights in accordance with the Highway Code, whereupon he could be heard adjusting the radio and hurling an unwanted CD from the offside passenger window.

(On the subject of car crime, the Ford Sierra became legendary at our school due to a manufacturing fault that made the windscreen easy to pop out and sell on, due to the rubber surrounds expanding with a blast from a hairdryer. You could also bypass the central locking systems of the day, which operated on compressed air, by cutting a tennis ball in half and banging it against one of the door locks. Also, pretty much everyone knew how to open padlocks with spanners, and how to distill cyanide gas from silk. Not that everyone went around doing that stuff all day, of course, but still. Life skills, mate.)

My Minstrels were stolen by Nat Baker with the same efficient nonchalance as a roofer’s van in Canning Town. I’m sure he just said ‘I’m having those’, and fucked off with them. I tried to wrestle them back in a rough-and-tumble kind of a way, but was restrained by one of his huge hands appearing on my black Lyle and Scott jumper, along with some nonsense threat like ‘Right. After school’ as if this was Grange Hill or something. I don’t recall feeling nervous during the intervening afternoon, perhaps presuming that our respective legal teams would sort it out. I do, however, recall being told I was going to be ‘marmalised’ – the only time I have heard this preserve-based adjective – and being advised to feign epilepsy as a result.

Incidentally, I offered to do this a couple of decades later at Joe’s wedding in order to have the ceremony waylaid, the shamefully inaccurate consensus being that this would be a good idea, if only so I could sober up enough to do my speech. In neither event did I do this, however, so did indeed find myself facing marmalisation over some Minstrels and, a couple of decades later, witnessed Joe’s wedding taking place as planned and on schedule. On one of these occasions, though, I had a sharpened compass point in my pocket as an aid to any stabbing-in-the-face opportunities that may arise. (I should point out that by ‘compass’ I mean the technical drawing instrument, not the navigational aid, because on neither occasion would knowing where magnetic North was have been any help whatsoever.)

Picters:

Main: Truth in advertising. Not sure where this was taken. Tottenham I think.

Top: Unused Ministry of Kitchenware apron labels. I miss the Ministry of Kitchenware, and intend to bring it back as an online store in 2023. Most of the old manufacturing plant still works, and it’s just sitting there and everything.

Lower: Old publicgriefjunkie t shirt label, found by my current girlfriend in a drawer in our haunted bookshop of a house.
Rock Climbing With The School Bully, Part II: Secrets and Lies

Nov 19th, 2022

Public Service Announcement: I had a pair of Adidas Sambas a few years ago and was well pleased with them. Very nice trainers, as it goes.

My son is diabetic. Well, to clarify – he isn’t, but I have told him and his school and his friends’ parents that he is so that he eats well without me having to watch him all the time. I mean, yes, you can go through all the rigmarole of explaining that overly processed sugary food is bad, and watch him eat it anyway because it is delicious, or let the world do the job for you by virtue of a small but significant fib. No-brainer.

Prior to this, when he was for some reason banging on about MacDonalds, I put some hospital sandwiches in a MacDonalds bag and told him I’d been to the drive-through on the way home. I’ve never liked MacDonalds and now, thanks to ham and pickle sandwiches from the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, neither does he. I remain disappointed, however, that he thinks I am the sort of person who would visit a drive-through, but you can’t have everything.

To continue our train of thought from the last post, it could be argued that the examples given above are a type of bullying, in that I am using knowledge and therefore power inappropriately. On the other hand, bollocks to that, because parenting is as difficult as you make it. That said, bullying can sometimes be controversial. For example, I once found myself in a room with a human resources lady who, to my astonishment, advised me that I was the subject of bullying in the council job I had at the time. I felt reassured by her cable knit jumper, which suggested both empathy and sincerity, so explained that if we were simply allowed to punch our colleagues, I wouldn’t need to waste time having conversations like this. I was immediately signed off for six weeks of my year-long contract, which I spent reading on my sofa and watching Minions films with Sid. It was a very happy time. After that, COVID happened, and although I went back to work, I never saw my colleagues again. When my contract ended, they generously sent me a load of booze as a leaving present – an ideal gift for the angry.

While we all find a cable knit jumper reassuring, the same cannot be said about golfing jumpers. Actually, the worst thing about golfing jumpers is being around people who play golf but, when combined with Adidas Sambas and Farah trousers, they were also once part of the uniform for the most violent people I have ever met. This Casual look, as it was known, was ideal for physical assault, not least at West Ham, as detailed here. I had older friends who sold Pringle jumpers to Northern casuals on away days in London. They were just ordinary jumpers with Pringle badges slashed out of bona fide goods from Lillywhites of Piccadilly by me seamlessly sewn into them, so the enterprise was built upon a solid foundation of good business sense.

One afternoon though, I discovered injustice. I’d already discovered theft, fraud and football hooliganism and found them quite exciting, but there was an annoying quality to injustice. It happened next to a school vending machine with ‘Toot Toot’ written on it in marker pen homage to the hit of the same name by Denise Lascalle, when Nat Baker, whose brother had been on HMS Sheffield in the Falklands when it was hit by an Exocet missile, stole my Minstrels. I was fucking outraged. Also, he once got off with Kelly Williams, who told me that her dad was Bungle on Rainbow. This was my go-to first-date anecdote until 2009 when she revealed that, in fact, he was in prison at the time for a failed robbery on a Highbury post office. On the other hand, Nat’s brother actually had been on HMS Sheffield because he came to school assembly one day to talk about it, and this gave him a certain kudos, if only among fellow pupils who I expect now have Help For Heroes bumper stickers on their Toyota Corolla hatchbacks. He also had a twenty a day Benson and Hedges habit, which was nice because I have always found a hint of fag smoke on clothing comforting. Preposterously, was something of a face at Tottenham, too, despite being 13. I wanted my Minstrels back, but Nat had eaten them. We had clearly arrived at an impasse.

Incidentally, in case you’re wondering, Runton hasn’t fallen off the planet or anything. Only bits of it survived COVID, with ‘Anton’ and myself obliged to seek other jobs once that somewhat suspicious global pandemic took hold. The currently operable bits are concerned with taking llamas to visit the terminally ill and growing root vegetables with criminals, and Joe organises that. I should send Kelly Williams’ old man up there dressed as Bungle.

Picters:

Main: Sundry cannulation equipment, including three-way taps, bionectors, flushes, Octopus singles and doubles – I usually like to say that this is a tennis tournament when discussing with patients, or that Octopus singles is a dating app – sterile wipes, tape etc.

Top: All the stuff I gather around myself during a quiet day with the Vascular Access team. We have here Huel savoury, Huel Black, plain water, Kindle, SIS energy drink, diet Coke, two mugs of strong black coffee and a book of crosswords I am usually too wired to do.

Lower: Peppermint-scented bike chain lubricant. Conceptually ridiculous, but an excellent lube.