almost witty

It’d be fair to say that I am no Adonis. I’m not a handsome man. So I’m not sure why the last two times I’ve seen a specialist doctor in a hospital, they’ve always wanted me to strip off.

The first time was to see a sleeping specialist. When I went in, he asked me to strip off to my pants, and lie on the bed. A bit of an odd request, I’d have thought, but I complied anyway. He made some basic pulse measurements, asked if I’d been hallucinating anything - then grandly concluded that there was nothing wrong with me and that I’d been wasting his time. Charming fellow.

This time around, it was to do with high blood pressure and my nose’s ability to erupt like a geyser spewing out lavafuls of blood at the most inopportune moments. Before I met the specialist, I’d spent 20 minutes with the nurse having my blood pressure measured in a variety of positions (”could you please stand on one leg and try to reach for that coffee cup on the shelf while I take your blood pressure, please?”) and being weighed. A somewhat pleasant surprise to find that I haven’t gained weight this year. Not so surprisingly, I haven’t lost any either.

So I walked into the specialist’s office, and was surprised to see a man and a woman there. The man asked me if I minded if the junior doctor observed, and I took this to mean the woman. I nodded my assent, which was possibly a fatal move since he then asked me to strip off. A tad confused, I asked him where I should strip off, to which I was told that I could do it behind the curtain.

So I stood there in my socks and pants behind the plastic curtain, before I plaintively asked the doctor what to do now. He asked me to come out from behind the curtain, and to take a seat. So I did - and was sat there for 15 minutes on a leather chair in my smalls while I tried to answer various questions about my lifestyle and avoid making eye contact with the junior doctor. I think it was when I confessed to my years of heroin abuse that the doctor twigged that I was a tad uncomfortable in this situation, and actually decided to make use of my nakedness.

By prodding my ankles. Which is apparently a sure sign of high blood pressure - but why I needed to be stripped naked for this for twenty minutes, heaven knows. He also took more heart measurements, although why I needed to be virtually naked for this I don’t know. He then decided to do some rather vigorous prodding in my groinal area, but this could easily have been done behind the plastic curtain, surely?

Blissfully, he told me to put my clothes on. And then sent me off for a battery of blood and heart tests, and a chest X-Ray. Which involved (again!) more stripping off with only a flimsy Homer-esque plastic gown and a lead panel pressed against my buttocks to save me from a radiation dose. Sometime in the next few weeks, I shall have to spend 24 hours peeing into a plastic bottle which contains some kind of acid, and take that to my doctor.

I bet at the end of all this, they’ll tell me that I just need to lose some weight to bring down my blood pressure. Strange, I’d suggest not being stripped in a doctors’ office and told to pee into a plastic bottle which stinks of vinegar.

For some reason, this bank holiday weekend I seem to have ended up on a bit of a spending spree. While in some ways this is a good thing - I haven’t bought a new book, DVD etc. in a while - this is also a very bad thing since with a wedding in Edinburgh to attend, and a London flat that’s going to drain me of a third of my monthly wage until I find a new tenant (and even then, I’ll have to declare income tax and yadda yadda on it) finances in the next few months are going to be a tad tight.

However, this hasn’t stopped me from buying:

- a Canon Powershot A570 IS - even though I already have a digital camera, but at least I get £50 cashback on it. Or maybe I should cancel my order. What do you think?
- a vacuum cleaner (joint purchase). Ignore what people say about Dysons - they’re not very good at retaining the dirt they suck up. Or maybe it’ll teach me not to buy electronic equipment from eBay.
- The Science of Doctor Who book. Because obviously there’s always room for a populist book on science or Doctor Who
- The Truman Show Special Edition DVD - because I just needed to add more DVDs to my collection that I’ll never get round to watching.
- Lord Of The Rings: Return of the King Special Features - well, it was only £1
- Doctor Who Magazine - well, it’s a must-have purchase
- Wired Magazine - so I can at least voyeur over the geek lifestyle
- A book from James May - because I need yet another bitty anecdotey but entertaingly-written book from a Top Gear journalist.
- A League of Gentlemen “Hello Dave” T-shirt. Even though I don’t know anyone called Dave.

Binge consumerism. It’s the new black.

Russell T. Davies once commented that the excitement of Doctor Who came from seeing extraordinary things in ordinary places. I don’t know whether police cars, ambulances and a helicopter count, but it raised a little excitement around here.

We were nipping out to get some bread for the evening (well, I’d have rather carried on building my fictional Llandudno in Sim City 4 but I guess city-building has to take a break every now and again!) when we noticed a police car driving past. Swiftly followed by an ambulance, and another police car. Oddly, all without their sirens blaring.

When we got to the local park that we cut through to get into town, three policemen walked past us from all directions, and asked us if we’d seen a man with a badly injured arm. Alas, we hadn’t, so went on our way.

But it wasn’t long till more police cars ran past us, and when we got to the open field, we could see a few policemen dotted around the landscape peering into gardens and hedges. Then when we left the field, we could see a helicopter heading towards us - and soon enough, it was hovering directly over us and the park. People in the houses surrounding the park were looking around the window looking for the helicopter.

As we left the park and headed into town, we could still see policemen and the helicopter down every other side street, looking for a badly injured man. As yer do. But no word as yet as to who or what they were looking for, and why.

And why on earth their sirens weren’t going off - thus removing half the fun of stalking policemen. It’s one of the things I miss about living in a city, oddly. The occasional sound of sirens reminding you that there’s excitement, intrigue, crime and quite possibly murder happening somewhere down the road. Then again, I once managed to sleep through an IRA bomb going off 4 miles away.

As you’d expect from spending two nights in the biggest non-capital city in the European Union, traipsing up and down the area where the Beatles honed their gig-playing craft while the city celebrates its’ Harbour birthday, there were one or two interesting moments and observations to be had. To wit:

- The unforgettable sight of a woman. In a wheelchair. Vomiting. If she wasn’t sitting on her arse, I’d say she was drunk off it. At least before dodging the projectile vomit she emitted on the side of the road while slumped over.

- Having a gorgeous two-course Portuguese seafood lunch for just six euros. This is before the drinking started in earnest and I couldn’t taste anything.

- The smell of German sausages. Love it.

- Watching football team St. Pauli playing a key match, and observing that sitting on a wooden bench in the outdoors watching a team you’ve never heard or seen of before, is somehow more atmospheric than sitting with 70,000 Welsh football fans at the Millennium Stadium watching Wales beat Italy. Although both times I missed the instant replay that you at least get on television.

- At one moment, there was a adapted Mexican crowd wave involving some kind of hand gesture. In trying to mimic said hand gesture for practise reasons, I got rather odd looks from the crowd around me before my compatriots told me to sit down. Quite possibly because my hand gesture was somehow being mistaken for a Hitler salute - or maybe they were being all “Don’t Mention the War!” at me.

- Watching The Noisettes playing in a crowded, hot, steamy basement rock club. While I’m sitting on a comfortable bar stool sweating away and wishing I was fifteen years younger and my legs weren’t hurting so much. At this point in the evening, I am well off the taste of beer.

- Ending up in a Filipino karaoke bar at 5am, where the resident German singer knows enough tagalog to sing a few songs. Watching the stag murder a song or two. Video footage on request!

- Walking home with some old school friends, and standing at 5.30am on a street corner having a good-humoured argument on what constitutes a blog, and whether any old diary content could be repurposed into a blog. I say it can.

- The final day, and my body has just given up on me. My entire lower body is screaming. My upper body and head is fine, oddly. At least until we wonder down to the harbour and watch people hanging upside down on a fairground ride.

And yes, Eddie Izzard fans, people from Hamburg are apparently called Hamburgers. And a doughnut does seem to be called a Berliner.

(Sorry, this post is about a dream I had - but it’s a very short post!)

I woke up this morning from a dream in which I told someone they were a cryptofascist. This so stunned the real me observing the dream me, that I just had to wake up from it.

Obviously, I’m worried about something.