On Being Lifted and Dropped.

The Lady Fu has been very much on the ball over the past week, introducing me to a whole Gaggle of Gorgeous Girlies and thereby keeping my spirits a little more buoyant than they mostly have been for the past (pick a number) years. (None of them were actually girls in the strictest sense I might add, being all over the age of majority. But not by much, and my fondness for alliteration declines to be denied.)

Yesterday I had my Ms Medeea fix, and today it was the turn of a young Arab woman called something beginning with F. I keep thinking Fatima, but I’m sure that’s no more right than the misguided notion that all Australian women are called Sheila. I think it might have been Farah, but anyway…

Her job was to take the latest phial of blood from my reluctant arm, but first we played the game of guessing where she came from. I tried Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco… ‘Cold. Go further east.’ OK. Saudi Arabia. ‘Close.’ Iraq? ‘Nope: Palestine.’ So then we talked about Palestine, how difficult the Arabic language is to learn, and how lucky we Brits are in not having to learn anybody else’s language because nearly everybody else speaks ours. (I suppose I should say a reluctant ‘thank you’ to America for giving the world a language that is close enough to English that we generally have little trouble understanding it.)

And then she asked me whether I liked to be warned before she put the needle in. Now, in all the years of having blood tests, vaccinations, and cannulas thrust into various parts of my arm, nobody has ever asked me that before. I brushed it nonchalantly aside, of course, because I still retain the merest smidgeon of pride in what little is left of my masculinity. And you know what? I never even felt the needle go in. That was another first. I assumed that Arabic women must be expert in the business of sticking sharp things into people, and speculated that it might derive from the near-legendary reputation of Damascus steel.

(But now I’m being silly. And it’s all in the game.)

*  *  *

Shortly after I got back I received an email from E.ON, my energy supplier, which knocked me off the top step and back to the basement as missives from E.ON usually do. Normal service was resumed with another reminder that our increasingly divided and dysfunctional society is being ever more controlled by an unholy alliance of politicians and the corporate world. I think I might have said that before, but since I’m now awash with glumness again I thought it worth repeating.