One Torturous Day.

I was fifteen minutes early for my doctor appointment this morning; the doctor was running fifteen minutes late. And so I sat for half an hour in a chair close to the automatic doors being repeatedly assailed by blasts of cold air every time another patient made its entrance or exit.

And on the wall facing me was a video screen vomiting instructions as required by the modern mania for risk avoidance: Don’t do this because it’s bad for you. You must do that or face some deleterious consequence. Avail yourself of screening for this, that, the other, and all the other others we haven’t thought of yet. Stay warm in the winter (Really?) Make sure your house is heated to a minimum of 18° Celsius. (Do they realise how much it costs to heat a house to minimum of 18° now that the energy providers are hiking their tariffs by 4x the rate of inflation just because they can?)

The best of them showed a bunch of pharmaceutical capsules dancing around, heads bobbing merrily, while somebody with a poor singing voice sang just about the worst song you could imagine anybody ever getting paid to write. They informed us that they were antibiotics, and wished us to know that antibiotics don’t cure everything. I did know that actually, and anybody who doesn’t must have trouble knowing how to put their socks on in the morning.

Meanwhile, I was beginning to feel ill from the icy onslaughts making their way through the automatic doors… And that wasn’t all.

They had Ashbourne Radio playing continuously from hidden speakers somewhere at ceiling level. I assume they have to be hidden so that people like me won’t have a credible excuse for taking a 12 bore shotgun into a doctors’ surgery. If ever I make positive identification of said speakers, I just might.

Ashbourne Radio is one of those small local radio stations which somehow manage to survive on an endless diet of inane muzak and twittering superficialities. It’s utter torture and I told the doctor so when I finally escaped into his office. He smiled and asked ‘What’s playing?’ ‘Bloody Ashbourne Radio,’ I said gloomily. He smiled again.

He then gave me a partial diagnosis of my condition, but left enough loose ends dangling in the murk of the immediate future to ensure that I shall remain stressed for at least the next eight days and probably beyond. In any event, it seems I’m to have an operation. Do you realise what a torturous thing the prospect of an operation is to a recluse with an invasion phobia and a horror of all things corporeal? It really is, you know. It is.

And so a good day was had by all. When I got back here (I never refer to this place as home) I was faced with another exasperating issue, but that one is too complex to write about.