Tag: East Anglia

Rock Climbing With The School Bully, Part I

Nov 7th, 2022

Public Service Announcement: We’ve just changed our WordPress subscription, so if this looks terrible, I can only apologise.

Is bullying all bad though? It’s a question worth asking. For example, a colleague of mine goes rock climbing with another colleague who used to bully him at school, which is both heart-warming and bleak. Well, this isn’t entirely true, as it’s actually a climbing wall, not larking about on a cliff or whatever. When I was told the news, I said ‘That mate, is not only bleak, it’s Dave Dee, Dozy, Bleaky, Mick and Tich’ surprising myself that a lesser known Sixties pop group was the conduit for my enthralled incredulity. They were from Devon I think, and did a not-unlikeable tune called Bend It, which I should like to re-record as Balls To It for a larf. Anyway. The reference went viral among the three other people in the room – appropriately, now I come to think of it, as it was a room in the pathogen lab – and led to a lengthy pile-on from all corners consisting of being up the bleak without a paddle, an insistence that bleak is the word a la the popular disco film Bleak starring John Travolta, and culminating in a warning to not eat too much chicken and bleak pie in case you get bu-leakmia. Nonetheless, childhood misery (in what we may safely assume was a secondary school) is the Highball Centre on Twickenham Road’s gain, so that’s the main thing.

Before we go any further, I should like to point out that my focus upon endemic bullying within the NHS is merely as a starting point for a new trade union. Working in a hospital is certainly awful, but it would be wrong to suggest that every corner of the National Health Service is a well-spring of human misery. In fact, my part – Radiology – functions more like a clinic than a hospital, and has a relatively sedate atmosphere. The first time I assisted with a trans-vaginal biopsy illustrates this: I attached the ECG cables wrongly and had to fiddle about sorting it all out, causing a delay. This can not only stress the patient, but shortens the time anaesthetic will be effective. Instead of being a dick about it, the consultant said to the patient ‘It’s OK – Paul’s used to working on bigger cases in our main theatres’, de-escalating the situation nicely. I greatly appreciated this and thanked him afterwards. Similarly, when an early patient-fetching expedition saw me crash into almost literally everything in the entire hospital, my colleagues explained that the bed was faulty and reported it to Maintenance, who sent a little man to take it away, covering up the fact that I was drunk.

Anyway. This was to have been a much longer post. I am turning it into a two-parter, though, as I have to pop round and see my old dear, who just rang to inform me that she has been buying gardening stuff. I hate the outdoors, and have insisted that I am only going round on the understanding that I am not helping in any way whatsoever with any actual gardening. To her credit, she has adjusted well to life in Norfolk and enjoys growing joyless vegetables such as courgettes on her allotment. However, she recently admitted to me that she ‘has always been in awe of strimmers’, and I am keen to see how a person in awe of strimmers reacts when they actually buy one.

Photards:

Main: A theatre trolley being prepared for, by the look of things, a standard drainage procedure.

Top: A staircase of my acquaintance, East Block, Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital.

Lower: As the UK’s only baseball fan, I took annual leave to watch the World Series, and when I came back my LA Dodgers mug was broken. I am treating it as a Hate Crime.
King Of All The Dogsbodies

Jun 4th, 2022

Public service announcement: Before we start, can I acknowledge that the Christmas references at the beginning of this post are out of place now that summer is upon us – these days, I’m either doing my job as an NHS hero or catatonic from doing my job as an NHS hero, so it takes longer to write stuff. Also, while we’re at it, can I ask that people stop buying NHS staff Cadbury’s Heroes, because everyone is fucking sick of them. End of announcement.

Silent night, holy night. At Runton, all is calm, all is bright. Round yon virgin – Becka, who has numerous children – the Estate sleeps in Heavenly peace, untroubled by the annoyances of the modern world, or indeed by anything much at all, except the noiseless rusting of the Victorian greenhouse and the nibbling of trees by deer wandering around the glamping fields. It seems likely to remain in statis until summer at least, with those of us comprising its estranged Estate Management team scattered hither and yon across sundry East Anglian villages or, in ‘Anton’s case, a kennel in Leeds, where he remains in business as a widely disliked electrician. Joe and I also have other things to do, of course: we remain a haphazard but effective IT help desk and, to my enduring disbelief, I have become a trainee nurse. Well, a trainee trainee nurse, as established previously. Joe valiantly keeps Runton alive, in the sense that bacteria are alive, with sub-zero classic film nights in the restored barn and discussions about skinning wild game with the survivalists for which Runton has long been a magnet, even when the only thing most people needed to survive was Bake Off going to commercial telly.

The world has been turning, of course. The Russian invasion of Ukraine

is awful, at least it took attention away from the Winter Olympics. Also, the middle class didn’t have a chance to sort everything out by writing ‘Love Wins’ in rainbow lettering across Red Square, or gluing themselves to public transport, because they were busy watching a bunch of fellow Lauras snowboarding on their gap year, which is what the Winter Olympics basically is. This is history now, though: as I write, we’re in the middle of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations of which, as a constitutional monarchist, I approve. Joe, Becka and their numerous children are in London taking in the festivities but, despite my monarchist leanings, I have no especial desire to wander around in a comedy union jack hat all weekend. In fact, the nearest I’ve been to a joyous outpouring was celebrating seeing a Spitfire while walking the dog by insisting that, as a family, we ate fish and chips afterwards while I played There’ll Always Be An England on a loop on my phone. The two public holidays were nice though and, as we don’t get paid public holidays in the NHS, I also now have an opportunity to work extra days to make the time up, which is a lovely bonus treat.

At work, the hospital exists in a state of insistent and unrelenting chaos, but for my immediate clinical colleagues there is a surprising amount of standing around during the working day. Less so for us trainee trainee nurses, for whom there are no end of menial things to be getting on with, but still a surprising amount. I should stress that this is peculiar to our little Radiology unit, which comprises four operating theatres into which we book patients. This means that the ball is in our court far more than the rest of the hospital, and because we are a theatre-lead unit, it only takes one surgeon to call in with COVID and the of the theatre team have nothing to do. We have a small ward for monitoring patients – or, as I insist we refer to them, contestants – pre- and post-procedure, but we don’t have overnight guests, which means that we function more with the atmosphere of a genteel private clinic than a publicly funded hospital. I mean, we are in a publicly funded hospital, but our secret lift to Level 4 is difficult to find, not for use by the unescorted public, and does a fine job of keeping the bedlam at bay. It also means that I can bring patients to the attention of clinical staff when bringing them in by announcing something along the lines of ‘Put your hands together, give it up, go wild, go crazy for Ethel, representing Great Yarmouth, and still rocking the main stage at 94’ to lift the mood a bit. This seems to please everyone and, as I say, we are bored quite often, so I shall continue to do it.

You may rest assured that the rest of the hospital is not like this. For future reference, the bits you want to work in are chemotherapy (the patients are independent and look after themselves), the mortuary (for, now I come to think of it, much the same reason) or paedeatrics because it’s a larf and most of time the parents do everything. I’d like to end up in maternity, as I would find the prospect of dealing with two patients at once interesting, although like paedeatrics they don’t employ males so I’d have to identify as a woman first. I could just identify as a midwife and start immediately, I suppose. Anyway, I remain generally weirded out by hospital life, and it’s worth remembering that I never wanted to be a nurse, let alone a trainee trainee nurse. Admittedly, it does seem an unlikely thing to have undertaken by accident, but that is more or less what happened when I blithely agreed to ‘give it a year and see what happens’ as a general Radiology dogsbody, mainly because I wasn’t really paying attention to what was being said to me. The term ‘dogsbody’ in this case is ill-advised, as although a dog could do most of my work, it would be more expensive to employ. It isn’t an aspirational post either – when neighbours ask my current girlfriend why I’m never around these days, she says I’m in prison.

That said, my rise to prominence is already underway; such is the shortage of staff that literally within an hour of passing my probation exam, I was awarded mentorship of all the other trainee trainee nurses, and therefore King of all the Dogsbodies. They need a bit of mentoring, too; during a written test, one of them was asked to list the PRIDE mnemonic representing the values to which the hospital and its staff allegedly conform. I expect the R is for ‘Respect’ and the E is for ‘Excellence’ and so on. You get the idea. Despite being a bit unclear myself when faced with the same question, I was nonetheless able to answer correctly because it is written on every single physical and electronic communication the hospital puts out, including, I couldn’t help but notice, the test paper itself. Unfortunately, my mentee failed to notice this, and failed the test as a result, prompting me to remark that perhaps the E is for ‘Eyesight’, and the I might mean ‘In Fucking Front Of You’. He successfully lobbied to retake the test on account of his autism, which is a relief, as staff of this calibre explain why, for a twelve hour shift with no paid breaks or lunch, we take home £55. Anyway. ‘There’s no ‘I’ in hospital’, as I am fond of pointing out to my little team, and with this as our motto we march forward together.

Photards

Main: Jubilee decorations by children. There are about fourteen tons of this stuff distributed around the place.

Inset top: Preparing a liver biopsy. My job is to hand all this stuff, and sundry other needles and spikes, to the bioper while they work on the biopee. I like to use these terms rather than ‘patient’ and ‘consultant’, because ‘biopsy’ is quite a jolly word when you think about how it actually sounds and that.

Inset middle: Sid eating a Jubilee cake. Although the flag is edible, I told him that eating it would be treason, which I will not accept in my house.

Inset lower: Ultrasound scanner. I tell patients we have to put this entire machine inside them to see what’s going on.
Mrs Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Porter

Sep 8th, 2021

Ever since Barack Obama proved that even a black Freemason can be President, there has been a pervasive belief that, for anyone, anything is possible. This is socially, culturally and literally untrue in the case of every person who has ever lived, but I get the general idea: we all have within us the ability to amaze ourselves, and that’s lovely. Indeed, I amazed myself recently by outperforming several other applicants, presumably goths, for a job wheeling corpses around a morgue at a popular East Anglian medical facility and, while this does not carry the same gravitas on the world stage, it was nonetheless quite a turn up for the books. I should state immediately there is more to the job than that, as I am to be trained to a surprisingly high level for, essentially, a hospital porter, but the corpse wheeling is where my predecessors have struggled. Well, that and the lifting and hefting of people, living and dead, ‘who aren’t getting any thinner’ as my new manager adroitly put it.

I enjoyed the interview. I usually do enjoy job interviews, and am considered ‘good in a room’, but was thrown by the question ‘Are you comfortable around cadavers, especially of those who may have died traumatically in accidents, or by suicide?’. The question intrigued me, because my career has things like ‘postman’ and ‘telecoms engineer’ and ‘market trader’ all over it, and an absence of anything that might be useful in this regard, like serial killer or murderer, so the answer is ‘No’. In fact, my initial thought was to say ‘Of course I’m not, you fucking weirdo, who the fuck is?’ but, remembering just in time that this was a job interview, I said ‘Yes’ instead, to be on the safe side. And lo, after a bit of to-ing a fro-ing, a job offer was forthcoming.

At Runton, response to the news was varied, ranging from Joe’s warm congratulations to ‘Anton’’s assertion that I only want to work in a morgue so I can go ‘nonce-ing and Savile-ing up the corpses’. For the benefit of foreigners, Jimmy Savile was an enthusiastic British paedophile and necrophiliac from a toxic time in the world of mainstream celebrity. My current girlfriend was once told she ‘…fills out her jumper nicely’ as a twelve year old by Rolf Harris, another notorious wrong ‘un of the era although, in his defence, at least he was good at drawing. At the height of his ubiquity, Savile was known for advertising the then-new Inter City train links criss-crossing the country. The service was only two years old at the time, which is presumably why he was interested in it, but while Jimmy Savile and I do both have several jobs – hospital porter, IT support, estate work at Runton, and a bit of UberEats delivery on the bike for me; television personality, charity fundraiser, paedophile and necrophiliac for him – we otherwise have nothing in common. Jimmy Savile was, by any measure except marathon running, a worse man than me, and I consider the matter closed. I mean he really was awful.

The fact remains, though, that a significant part of my new working life will be spent in a morgue, on my own, surrounded by the dead. I feel that my time up the council among colleagues who also had no brain function or dress sense might come in useful here. Sometimes, I would have wheeled people to the morgue a few hours after wheeling them into theatre for what turned out to be unsuccessful life saving surgery, which will at least give a sense of continuation, but still. For all that, though, dealing with the newly dead, and being responsible for their dignity at an undignified time, is a privilege. Also, a morgue is a place where, if nothing else, there is no suffering, which is an extra incentive to be chirpy. I’ll probably start by addressing the room to the effect that can anyone who isn’t dead make themselves known before I start rearranging limbs and writing labels and so on, because I am likely to freak the eff out if someone wakes up half way through. As far as I am concerned, going about my tasks with the demeanour of a 1950’s bus conductor is a way of remembering that my subjects, embracing mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything were, until an hour ago, as alive and embroiled in the lunacy of the days as you and I. And, when the cycle ride home has blown the formaldehyde out of my hair, and my son is brandishing implausible Lego creations at me and my dog is trying to climb into my shirt, it will remind me to be grateful to still be here.

So there we are. Once the references are sorted out, which should be OK as I’m writing them myself, I will be an NHS worker, entitled to gentle applause and people giving me rainbow hearts with ‘Thank You’ written on them wherever I go. Now I think of it, I’ve also worked in a food hub during this pandemic, so I’m basically Marcus Rashford. Sid’s about to start school any second now, too, and it will be strange to be among the recently deceased on a professional basis, for thirty-nine hours of exceptionally physical work split into thirteen hour shifts over a three day week, instead of looking after him all the time. Then again, a cornerstone of my parenting style is the old adage that ‘a tired boy is a good boy’ so, bearing that in mind, I might get him to do it.

Pictards

Main: They have mown the wheat in the field behind our house, and not before time because it was all overgrown.

Top inset: Leeds fan dressed at Jimmy Savile. ‘Why did West Ham run at Leeds? Because the Under 5’s were scared of Jimmy Savile’, as the old joke goes (the ‘Under 5’s’ were a useful West Ham hooligan firm back in the day, essentially functioning as understudies to the better known ICF).

Middle inset: Leeds fan Jimmy Savile, dressed as Jimmy Savile, in a style that immediately marks him out as not at all sinister or anything like that.

Lower inset: I cycle past this quite often. Lower Street is a patchwork of small, unkempt fields and wooden shacks where plague victims were banished to fend for themselves during an outbreak of the Black Death in 1349, and which is still generally avoided. There is an Upper Street too, where you were allowed to live if you didn’t have plague. Norfolk is extremely pretty, but there is low key sinister stuff like this at every turn.
The Runton Drive-In Cinema Club

Sep 1st, 2021

Allegedly, there is a dog snatcher operating in the Runton area, although I am unconvinced. I discussed the evidence with ‘Anton’ recently as we took delivery of a projector and screen for a showing of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which also features a crime involving a dog, and which is part of a broader plan of Joe’s to revive the estate’s post-pandemic fortunes. Coincidentally, the bloke delivering the projector was, like the Baskerville hound, also once the subject of legal scrutiny, as the subject of the popular rhyme Ellie and John, Ellie and John / Legally right, but morally wrong, a reference to the ages of he and his girlfriend, being at the time 51 and 17 respectively. Anyway. My source for the dog snatcher, a Northrepps simpleton, claims that he drives around in a van with RSPCA spelled incorrectly on the side ‘Which is how you know it’s him’. Apparently, last week he drove into a woman at speed, breaking her spine. He then stole her dog. ‘Stole her fucking what?’ said ‘Anton’, identifying the point at which he felt the behaviour had become unacceptable. After further discussion, we agreed that not being able to spell ‘RSPCA’ correctly is likely to draw attention to yourself and was an oversight we would be keen to correct. In possession of a screen and projector and exciting spools of actual celluloid film which we hoped Joe would know how to make work, we watched John drive off. ‘Do you think he can spell ‘paedo’ correctly?’ mused ‘Anton’, which was a bit much.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the first in a series of outdoor film nights that will initially be held in the Restored Barn. The initial response seems to be good; we have already had interest from a sizeable local film club which disbanded during the Pestilence when it became illegal to have more than seven people in the same place, even if two of them are ghosts, which is quite likely in the countryside where everything is terrifying, so that’s a start. If it takes off, we can hire a massive screen and run it like a drive in and, to test the idea while keeping things highbrow, we have a season of Carry On films scheduled for autumn. If you are unfamiliar, Carry On films are an oddly likeable cinematic franchise consisting of Barbara Windsor’s bikini top falling off while Sid James furiously stabs the cat under a copy of the Racing Post dressed as a doctor and shouting ‘Blimey!’ to a soundtrack of slide whistles and ‘arooga’ style old school car horns, over and over again, for an hour and a half. They are every bit as wonderful as they sound.

While I’m sure Carry On films are all very cool and comforting and post ironic and what not, The Hound of the Baskervilles is more in keeping with Runton, what with it being a slightly creepy shagging retreat for minor Victorian aristocracy in the middle of nowhere and everything. A drive-in here showing, for example, horror films in the bleak, black, midwinter would work well. To spice things up, ‘Anton’ and I could knock on the windows of unsuspecting film buffs during the Blair Witch Project and see if they soil themselves with fright, an idea we had as we unfolded deckchairs and formed them into the seating area. I am not a great cinema buff but, if there was one change I could make in any film, it would be to have Han Solo shout ‘What?’ instead of ‘I know’ when Princess Leia says she loves him in the carbonite chamber during The Empire Strikes Back. This would make sense, too, because it was a hectic moment with a lot going on, it was quite noisy in there, and if nothing else it would’ve saved her considerable faff of rescuing him in Return Of The Jedi if he’d replied that he wasn’t into it to begin with. As we made sure our rows of deckchairs were nice and neat, we rounded off our appreciation of the cinematic arts by reflecting upon how Peter Sellers apparently had eight heart attacks in three hours after huffing a bucket of poppers prior to having a go on Britt Ekland, and how, all things considered, that must have been quite a remarkable evening.

In summary, I urge visitors to enjoy East Anglia untroubled by concerns around spinal injury and dog theft. I hereby dismiss the dog snatcher story as nonsense as, if nothing else, many dogs here are owned by people who also legally own firearms, and who would happily discharge them at a rogue member of the Society to Prevention Cruelty Animals of Royal. That said, if you should find yourself face to face with the undead while enjoying the scenic delights of the area during the coming winter months, it isn’t me and ‘Anton’ pissing about. It’s actually happening, so stay in the moment and deal with it. In any case, ‘Anton’s proposed change to The Empire Strikes Back would be to have the film exactly as it is, but with ‘…both of Princess Leia’s tits out all the time’, so he is already horrifying enough.

Picters:

Main: Cromer Hall, said to be the inspiration for the house in the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Top inset: My dog, not the inspiration for the hound in the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Middle inset: Likeable cinematic sex pest Soloman Joel Cohen, aka Sid James.

Lower inset: The view from our front room window last winter. Owls all over the place, and probably haunted too, I should think. That said, the dog likes it.
Return of the Glampers

Aug 16th, 2021

I am at Runton and, while summer has been as fickle in Norfolk as anywhere else, I can finally see nothing but sunshine and greenery and warm unhurriedness from my position in the shade of the Restored Barn. There are at last things to do here, because as summer finally settles down, the sound of yoga mats, soya milk, pronouns and ukuleles from the South Field can only mean one thing: the middle class is here, and it wants to go glamping. In case you are unfamiliar, ‘glamping’ is a term for sitting in a tent with a rainbow flag in front of it, looking pleased with yourself. I have never understood the attraction of tents – an animal might tread on it at any moment, how do you relax? and so forth – but, that aside, their return is good news. It’s particularly good news if, like ‘Anton’ and myself, you hire out the tents which the Olivers and Lauras and their Noahs and Tillys glamp in, thus generating a tiny income for yourself. Also, it’s just nice to see people here for the first time since the Pestilence. I therefore welcome the return of the middle class who, in many ways, are just like normal people. Yes, they are physically and morally weaker, have no cultural identity of their own, are very unhappy and rarely breed because they are clearly an evolutionary dead end but, in my experience, they hire a lot of camping equipment. For that alone, they have no case to answer as far as I am concerned.

I’ve never had a heart attack, which is something. However, while wandering around the Estate just prior to re-opening I thought I could be having one when I suddenly got some nasty cramping in both legs. Having never experienced this before, I assumed it was blood clots crawling up my arterial system to kill me, but decided that there was no point making a fuss, as there was no one around and no phone signal to call anyone with, so I put my Spotify Christmas carol playlist on in case I was about to meet God and hoped for the best. In turn, this meant that I was able to get away from my audio book, Lancaster and York by Alison Weir, an account of the Wars of the Roses narrated by the same woman who does the announcements on the Docklands Light Railway, compromising the otherwise faultless literary style. At one point, for example, I thought the catastrophic ineffectiveness of the child king Henry VI was caused by a signal failure at Limehouse, when it wasn’t at all – it was caused by dynastic squabbling between leading landowning families in fifteenth century England, which is a very different thing. I had my dog with me and, stumping painfully across land nominally loyal to York during the conflict but more interested in pursuing an ancient feud with the de la Pole family in Suffolk, I reflected that if anyone was going to eat my corpse, it was only fair he had first go. Also, ‘de la Pole’ sounds like amiable Nineties jazz-rap hip-hoppers De La Soul, who would struggle to win a feud against the Clangers. I wondered briefly if that might be my last thought on earth and, if so, how history would remember me.

Archie is a semi working dog, well capable of doing his job of pursuing small game such as rabbits and hares across open land until they collapse, then standing over them with the same expression as a glamper with a rainbow flag until his owner turns up. Otherwise, he is very enthusiastic about being a dog and spends most of his leisure time going happy delighted bananas around anyone he can find. This sounds lovely, but he is no lap dog and will nip any unfamiliar limbs that are unexpectedly shoved at him. Not hard or viciously, but enough for me to keep him under close control around new people and not, for example, to let him hurtle at thirty miles an hour towards a small family of unexpected glamping outliers. To my considerable dismay, he had locked onto a small girl of about six. She remained calm and relaxed, instead of shrieking, trying to shoo him off with her arms or running away, which is the standard middle class response to unfamiliar dogs or, now I come to think of it, working class people. Archie stopped. The little girl stopped. They regarded each other, him looking down and her looking up. She shoved her hand into his face and stroked all of it, including his teeth and eyeballs. He was unfussed. I jogged closer, relieved that he wasn’t about to cause the whole estate to be closed down by savaging an infant. Perhaps, if middle class people can learn to get along with dogs, they can one day learn to get along with the rest of us? Just a thought. Anyway, dizzy with relief, I exchanged ‘Hellos’ and ‘Well, he’s never done that before’s with the family, who were enchanted with him. I didn’t want to trouble anyone by mentioning that I might be having a heart attack in my legs, so I let it go, and the girl pointed at me and said loudly ‘Daddy, that man’s dog is starving’, signalling the end of the encounter. I later learned they had been looking at Becka’s Forest School, a special place where children who are fucking intolerable go to collect pine cones in a shoe box. She seemed unsuited to it if you ask me.

And thus, life returned to the Runton Estate, the small but undeniably likeable rural shagging retreat for minor Victorian aristocracy in deepest East Anglia. Our conspiracy theorists have gone (‘…or have they?’, as I like to say every time this is mentioned, to annoy Joe) but, although I may have un-Clingfilmed my last sandwich buffet for the Flat Earth Society, yoga, both deaf and outdoor, are fully booked. We may have a bride-less bridal suite in the Old Servants’ Quarters, horseless stables by German Field and allotments full of runner beans and courgettes that everyone hates but I have survived not having a heart attack and we are, if nothing else, still here. Chin up, everyone!

Public Service Announcement: I have no idea what the thing with my legs was, cramp of some kind I should think. I find I get it if I’ve not ridden my bike for a few days. ‘Severe, unexplained pain is never normally something to worry about’, as the old saying goes.

Picters:

Main: Cricket at Cromer. Always a lark.

Top inset: Wheat being harvested prior to being turned into things middle class people probably won’t be able to digest.

Middle inset: Wattle-and-daub interior of the walls in my son’s room.

Lower inset: Archie, a naturally sleek and idiotic, but not starving, dog.