Tag: norfolk

To Pass The Time Along

Sep 21st, 2022

Public Service Announcement: This is a slightly bitty post, as I am experimenting with writing entirely on work time, either while waiting for the East Block lift, which is never in a hurry, or in the cardiovascular outreach office, an airless cupboard which has not seen natural light since 2002.

I was on a train recently when the driver announced via the public address system that we were ‘to prepare ourselves for dreadful news’. As my old friend Rachel pointed out from distant Nebraska, this is not a comforting way to address passengers on a mass transit system but, as we were still in Norwich station waiting to set off, there seemed little immediate cause for alarm. The news was that the Queen had died, and that the moment Smiths fans had been waiting for since 1986 had finally arrived. Well, not me, as I am both a Smiths fan and a monarchist, but still. The lady on the seat next to me immediately turned and said ‘My God! What do we do now?’ and I said there was no point asking me as I couldn’t believe it, even though we had been following the news of her physical deterioration at work all day. The Queen had, in fact, passed away as I was cycling onto Riverside from Barrack Street via the Bishop’s Bridge roundabout on the way to the station. Upon arriving home, I woke Nid to pass on the unhappy news. He had a considerable cry but, after his concerns about ‘what happens to the Spitflier’ (the Spitfire we saw during the Jubilee celebrations which he believed the Queen to be piloting) were addressed he promised to ‘defend the new King’ and went back to sleep. Thus, in our corner of the Realm, the three hundred year reign of lovely old Queen Elizabeth II was consigned to history.

Still, in the midst of life we are in death, as Agatha Christie, who should know because she was murdered on the Orient Express, would doubtless remind us, and my work up the hospital is an unending opportunity to contemplate mortality. Consider, for example, a nephrostomy, which is a surgical procedure whereby a thin tube is inserted percutaneously into your kidney to Lyin’ Eyes by the Eagles. It’s always Lyin’ Eyes by the Eagles, because patients under local anaesthetic can listen to their music of choice, and those with compromised urinary function love the Eagles. Lyin’ Eyes pops up on the ‘This is the Eagles’ Spotify playlist just as the catheter goes in, and during Tequila Sunrise, I will say ‘OK Ray/Joan, I need you to take a deep breath, deep as you can, and hold it till I tell you, OK?’ in my ‘now-pay-attention’ hospital voice.

(Tone of voice is more important than you might think. In common with people dealing with children or dogs, I have to use my ‘now-pay-attention’ voice, because if they don’t take a deep breath, they will enter cardiac arrest as New Kid In Town starts. If this was to happen, I assume the background music would return to Chaka Demus and Pliers’, cover of Twist and then Shout, which gets more airtime than you would otherwise expect in a clinical environment, because younger patients usually want ‘stuff from the 90s’. This, then, is the soundtrack to interventional surgery in the Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Abba also feature regularly and, as an after thought, we will all have to get used to them singing about the ‘Dancing King’ now. It’ll be an adjustment but we’ll get used to it I expect.)

Anyway. I never tell Eagles fans they are a breath away from cardiac arrest during a nephrostomy. This raises an ethical point, as the information is clearly relevant and, assuming they have the capacity to understand, should they not know? I would argue that to do so could worry the patient out of a procedure which, equally clearly, it is in their best interest to have. Conversely, if I was too jocular, they might not take it seriously and inhale their way to the mortuary which, as the person who would have to wheel them there, only adds to my workload. My work is full of dilemmas like this.

Then again, I have learned that no good songs have ever been written about being on a highway in your mid-forties, thinking about some stoner you had a go on twenty years previously, which seems to be pretty much all the Eagles’ lyrical content concerns itself with, apart from the unforgettable Hotel In California, which is presumably about doing the same thing but drunk. The pleased-with-itself music of American baby boomers is fucking insufferable. Actually, I shall revise that, as I once sold a load of t shirts to the Doobie Brothers, most famous for Listen To A Bit Of Music, at Camden Market and they were a right larf. At around the same time, I sold stuff to Jon Squire of the Stone Roses, either Cagney or Lacey from Cagney and Lacey, the Blue Man Group and the lady responsible for shredding and burning Taylor Swift’s underwear after her two shows at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. What halcyon days they were.

If I ever find myself having a procedure – not beyond the realms of possibility, as I appear to be presenting symptoms of peripheral arterial disease – I want twenty five minutes of white noise played as my music of choice, the same as at my funeral. At my funeral, I’ve always wanted to have a list of names of a) the people in the congregation I never really liked and b) why I never really liked them read out as I am gathered unto God, so there is a running order to be worked out there. Maybe white noise, then the names of a) the people in the congregation I never really liked and b) why I never really liked them, then a minutes’ applause (as is the modern way), then the national anthem, then speed dating among the single members of the congregation to lighten the mood. Yes, that sounds lovely.

So there we are.

Photards:

Main: Northrepps church.

Inset top: An operating theatre, aka procedure room or suite or lab. I’m lobbying to get a pool table put in to make it less formal.

Inset middle: The ‘box’. If you are ‘running’ for a theatre you sit here and prepare anything that might plausibly be required during a procedure in case someone in the room asks for it. It’s relatively simple to run for a specialised room like this, but in main theatres it is extremely complicated and requires skill, speed, and detailed knowledge.

Inset lower: Scrub room with trough-style urinal.
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.
Getting Things From Cupboards

Dec 6th, 2021

Until recently, I’ve always imagined that Bad, by sinister pop star Michael Jackson, is what’s playing in my dog’s mind when he puts his head out of the car window on a sunny day. While I still believe this, I also now also associate it with vital surgery conducted under local anaesthetic as, at the request of the patient, it was playing in an operating theatre I found myself in last week. The atmosphere was surprisingly informal and, while I was only there to mop up afterwards, it was an enthralling experience, and an unexpected light moment in what has been a grueling introduction to hospital life.

My main medical speciality thus far is getting things from cupboards and putting them in other, smaller cupboards. I explained this to a nurse during my first shift on an actual ward. She seemed pleased.

‘So – do you want anything from a cupboard at all?’, I asked after a short pause.

‘Um, no’, she replied, and our conversation ended there.

I didn’t see her again, because hospitals are run by Health Care Assistants, who are the people in shiny grey nylon uniforms you see scurrying about the place. HCA training is part of the complex and arduous NHS boot camp to which I am to be subjected over the foreseeable future. Nurses are often seen as somewhat lazy by HCA’s, although every nurse I have spoken to has been friendly and helpful – largely, I suspect, because I look like everyone’s dad, and am usually the only male staff member they have ever seen. If I didn’t wear a uniform and keep getting things out of cupboards they would think I was a patient, even though, in this intensely female environment, 80% of those are female, too. ‘Why are women are so fucking ill?’, as I remarked during my first tea break, seven hours after I started work.

I quickly realised that here, order and chaos are the same thing. Every minute of every hour of every day, the jigsaw is disassembled, thrown into the air, and somehow comes down again with all the bits in the right place. It’s a thing to behold. Everyone is hurrying somewhere, but also hurrying nowhere, as indecent haste would be bad form. Indeed, the first trick you learn is how to walk fast-slow, which makes your shins hurt. Actually, that is the second trick you learn. The first is the pragmatic bonhomie that is the only sustainable response to the tsunami of human inconvenience hurtling towards you on all sides. Perhaps the most surprising thing, given my aversion to the infirm and gag reflex that triggers whenever I smell hospital food, is that my fledgling medical career seems to be off to a satisfactory start, despite the initial bout of training being so intense that I would silently weep on the train home. At the end of the first week I announced I was getting ‘Nothing Is Real’ tattooed on my arm, as whispering this to myself behind my COVID mask was the only way I had coped with large parts of the previous five days. I consider myself to be a physically and mentally strong person, too – God knows what the affect would be on someone who was a bit of a bender.

With regards to the tea break I mentioned earlier: these are not paid. Neither are roughly half my fifteen training room classmates, all of whom are female, twelve of whom are under 24, and all of whom are solidly working class. Young working class females are an unstoppable force of nature rarely acknowledged in contemporary society. They aren’t even Millennials, because Millennials are a middle class invention, pertaining to middle class youth. My classmates are the chavs at the bus stop. They are also, as far as I am concerned, collectively the girl in the wartime We Can Do It poster, which white middle class women unsurprisingly think is somehow about them. Many of my classmates are engaged to soldiers and, come to think of it, the armed forces must be pretty working class too, or else we’d have aircraft carriers called HMS Fri-yay or HMS Yoga. It’s probably worth remembering at this point that neither the working class nor middle class, nor any gender whatsoever, is looking to me to sort it out. Still, in response to their astonished enquiries, I explained that I am here because, as an almost entirely female entity, the NHS needs someone who can open jars and help with parallel parking, as the car park is so messy it’s visible from space. We are training vocationally, as no one can afford to go to university and are, essentially, trainee trainee nurses, occupying a rung on the health care ladder so low that most people would never know it existed. At least we are not contributing to the parking problem, because there is a six year waiting list for a permit. Parking with the patients costs sixteen pounds a day, so no one drives to work. I commute by a variety of methods including, if all else fails, a fifty mile round trip by bike which, rather touchingly, my fellow trainee trainee nurses think is impossible. This is high praise indeed, because I consider them capable of literally anything. In two years’ time we could be proper state registered nurses, with the opportunity to earn roughly as much as a full time Uber driver, so there’s a lot to play for.

I found myself reflecting, as I performed routine observations on a fading woman in a side room who would die before my shift finished, that this is how it ends for all those Beatle fans I’ve been watching in old footage all this time. It ends here, gurgling to nothingness in a provincial hospital with a trainee trainee nurse saying ‘I’m just going to do your blood pressure, Janet’ and asking family members, gathered around the bed, if they want any biscuits or anything. There is, as ever, mercy: their loved ones won’t remember them like this, and the wider world will forever remember them in brilliant dresses, screaming at the Beatles. I have never subscribed to the mawkish deification of NHS workers as heroes and, once I explained to my classmates what ‘mawkish deification’ means, neither have they. That said, it is, from the outset, a demanding, responsible and sometimes lonely way to earn a living. I find it easy to compartmentalise, because when I get home I often can’t believe any of it actually happened. There is no doubt, as I explained to my current girlfriend, that the Paul of six weeks ago is no longer with us. Part of my inner being is being scoured away, to be replaced by something, well, more. ‘Are you sure this is a hospital?’, she said, ‘You haven’t accidentally joined a fucking cult, have you?’

Photards:

Main: I once had a long and successful career as a market trader and general quick thinking hustle merchant. Seems a long time ago now. This is my old pitch in the East Yard, Camden Lock which I shared with Northern C3PO, aka Martin the Jewellery Vendor, for five years. By the look of things, this is summer 2009. Shortly after this, I moved the main operation to Greenwich.

Inset top: After witnessing surgery for the first time.

Inset middle: We Can Do It, assuming there are vegan menu options and no gluten within a fifteen mile radius.

Inset lower: They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old.
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.