House-ache

900 years behind the rest of the world here, and due to frugal amounts of telly watching, (aside from the unmissable or I shall surely expire… 3 versions of the weather forecast) I saw one episode of House yesterday. Instant relief Mr Laurie playing an obnoxious crankpot, mais oui, how fine, but House nowt to do mit habitation, mais non, it’s another Hopital a la tele fiasco.

Thanks to the domination of sincerely mad and nothing to be learnt from them medical dramas on the tube I have lost all interest in medical matters and acquired a medical pain in my hole at the sight of white coats or get a trolley in here on-screen.

It beggars the question:
have screenwriters/television producers had an naturally high number of encounter with obnoxious doctors or are there genuinely a very high number of obnoxious doctors populating the planet? You can find out for yourself at ratemydoctor.com

The point being I’d like to offer some alternative and varied occupations for successful onscreen portrayal and all of whom have the onscreen potential to be both interesting and obnoxious. (disclaimer: meant in the fictional sense only)

– bus drivers

– dental hygienists

– Greenhouse owners (specifically pushing the limits on tomatoes)

– librarians

– dinosaur egg experts

– elevator companies

 The medical confusion that evolves from these hospital dramas is intense: what! you can’t have an MRI if you’ve plates in your face? Pity they don’t tell those of us with plates that. We have to learn it from sodding House, if indeed it’s even true. And doctors complain about hyper educated patients graduated from the medical school of Google!

When I think back down the years to working in a nameless London hospital I have the most hilarious memory of being informed by one of those NHS manager types that one snotty doctor, who I’d been greeting in what was considered in those staid old days as too cheerful a manner (you know what doctors are like he’d ho-hummed embarrassed to us …)  had requested that we not speak to him.

Imagine here we are checking his patients in at the waiting area and we must not speak to him. What exactly were we supposed to do if one of them fell in a heap? The ironic thing was they were all suffering from serious illnesses and our chirpy greetings were no doubt keeping them afloat as they collected the grim news of what I think were called T Cell counts and CT scans.

Once one of the patients gave me thirty oranges (did he think I had scurvy?) another handed me a very sober looking grey wool suit (point taken, I was in a punk rock phase) another fifty quid, gloria in excelsis etc.

No doubt this is the kind of pompous nonsense (the don’t speak to me rule, not the presents) that spurned such TV shows and ruined the lives of medical students, who had to put up with his morse code style of communication.  In that context ratemydoc frankly doesn’t seem such an outlandish concept.

George Eliot fogged in throat and head

In keeping with my curiosity for all things literary and meteorological here is George Eliot or Pollian as she signs the letter beleaguered by fog  on 13 November 1852..

“O this hideous fog!  Let me grumble for I have had headache the last three days and there seems little prospect of anything else in such an atmosphere. I am ready to vow that I will not live in the Strand again after Christmas. If I were not choked by the fog, the time would trot pleasantly withal, but of what use are brains and friends when one lives in a light such as might be got in the chimney?…”

 From a letter to The Brays. (Selections from George Eliot’s Letters edited by Gordon S  Haight published by Yale Univ Press).

Meteorological-chondria perhaps. I had no idea fog could give a headache and choke you. All Dickensian induced romance on fog is henceforth abruptly dumped. Though Pollian might these days have benefitted from the lack of light according to the new thinking on the dangers of light pollution.

May 29th 1835

From Eugenie De Guerin’s journal: (pardon the accent omissions)

 “Never did a storm last so long, it is raging yet. For the last three days the thunder and rain have held their revels. All the trees bend under the deluge: it is cruel to see them look so wearied and faint amidst the bright triumph of May…”

 May! Jaysus! A three-day storm in May? Crikey. A nice meteorological nugget to ponder from 1835 as we brace for global warming.

Einstein’s Fiddle

Einstein partial to the fiddle: interesting radio piece on Einstein’s relationship to the violin here.

Richard Ford

Richard Ford in yesterday’s Graun:

“Writing doesn’t just come, it requires a lot of furrowing of my brow,” he says, which is one reason he has rarely written about some elements of his life – hunting and fishing, for example – that he would rather just do: “If I wrote about those things, I’d have to be thinking and thinking and thinking.”

He is dyslexic, which he believes may account for his need to concentrate, in his view, particularly hard. “I have to work at making the things that I hear, and also the things that I read, break into my thinking, otherwise they can go right by me in a blur…”

I’m familiar with that blur, it’s reassuring to have it articulated thus….since I assumed a lack of sleep was at the root of it.