The sensation of having fallen down a crevasse between two medical departments in a hospital, (let’s call them the “Lungers” and the “Hearties”) can seem acute at about 5.30 am on a Tuesday morning in January when there’s nearly three hours before the feeble sun might start practising at being springtime.
Ian Patient can hear a hacking cough from another section of the ward, and the sound of a night nurse shuffling papers and clicking them into folders. A distant sounding radio is faintly playing pap pop and Ian Patient can almost but not quite, recognise some of the tunes.
In front of him Ian Patient can see two china teacups placed on the edge of a porcelain sink. These are the only purely white objects around apart from a bit of the corner of a bedsheet that Ian can see out of the corner of his eye. Nothing else; walls , polystyrene ceiling tiles, formica panels covering piping, bed, plastic blind strips hanging in the window ( with a gap in the middle), is wholly quite white. It is all pale grey or sickly green, or in the case of the floor lino speckled with dark grey flecks. Bits of the chair and bedside cabinet are beige wood, the steel rubbish bin is mushroom coloured; the most colourful object in the room is a yellow plastic sharps bin fixed halfway up the wall that Ian Patient faces, not quite on a level with three grey plastic light switches situated in the same wall.
Ian shouldn’t complain he’s doing a cheap, quasi-voluntary health cure in the poor man’s Priory. He has a room to himself with en suite facilities (the grey lavatory door is just to his left). Ian hopes that he is not ungrateful and then immediately wonders what he should be grateful for. He’s paid taxes in every one of the thirty eight years of his working life and still some since; but that’s for the facilities and skills of the NHS and its staff. He is grateful for the care and patience shown to him.
“Money can’t buy me love” as Beatles say.
Ian feels some satisfaction to know that business executives and the like probably pay more than he’s ever earned to get hospital rooms to themselves, albeit ones with flowers and probably more interesting décor. But, then again, he wagers that these fatcats have a way whereby they don’t personally pay and somehow working stiffs are subsidising them. Ian wasn’t even a working stiff any more, he got an occupational pension awarded on the basis of ill health and even that was less Tax. The thought was working in Ian up into an enormous, lefty frenzy so that he was ready to gnash his morning Weetabix with the fangs of righteous proletarian fury.
This was what sensory. deprivation was doing to Ian, and myriads of other intelligent beings everywhere.
Earlier Ian caught himself sitting on the loo, picking little flakes of dead skin off his toes and for a moment stood outside his present self, as a former younger self, looking in through the bars at London zoo. He was then almost on the point of getting ready to take a couple of puffs of his inhaler, as he was supposed to every morning, but he thought and planned his journey across the room to the bedside cabinet carefully so as to make this experience last as long as possible.
One of Ian’s keepers, nurses, a tall young Filipino, comes in to take Ian’s blood pressure, temperature etc.: he looks like Cochise in a Hollywood western but does not address Ian as “Kimo Sabe” or suggest that he has a forked tongue; he says “he early bird catches the worm.”
“Yuh” Ian says in a grunted non-committal reply past the thermometer that had been placed in under his tongue.
When Cochise was gone, Ian set off on the inhaler quest and then a far longer safari along the grey corridors where the phlosflorescent light is mixing with dawn. He was aiming to discover if there was a three pin electric socket in the Patients’ “Lounge”.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Les Noises d'Antan of Steve Allendripp
All hospitals are haunted; they are locations of long wakefulness, hidden sleep, comas, drugged states and all other stations on the Circle Line, (from the cradle to the grave, (with careful record keeping)).
Sometimes the machinery on some hospital Wards can sound like it was designed by a man who spent many happy years next to some slough, listening, thrilled, to the trilled mating calls of its amphibian inhabitants. He was probably zonked out of his head on laudanum so he didn’t get the Dengue and didn’t feel it as the mossies drilled their probosci into his swamp-hardened hide.
But it could have been a woman who found the repeated chirruping vocalisations of frog testosterone comforting. In any event, whoever it was seemingly wished to impart the solace that they derived from such amphibian racket to others; perhaps more than anywhere else on Intensive Care Wards, where one can hear the peeping and beeping of the various electronic monitors that track hearts, pulses and intra and extra bodily fluid flows of many sorts.
Possibly the imaginary swamp margin dwelling computer noise designer , (or designers), had a Swiss colleague whose childhood joys and comforts came, not from proximity to fetid marshlife, but from the cool clean air of high summer alpine pastures, replete with leather-clad yodelling cattle herders herding leather-clad cattle, that had bells round their necks.
Swissperson gave bell-like sounds to the ECG machines attached to some patients in some wards. Each one like, the bells of the mountain kine, might ring with a different note from others or ring at a different pace to the others, depending on what which patient’s body did.
Above all the bells and frogs, in most adult wards, most patients seemed mostly silent save for the occasional cough or groan, but there often seemed to be those who had something to shout like:
“ADADGA! A BADGER! A GADGE! AGGAGGA! AAAA! AAAAAAAA! A DAGGER! A WEEEA! A WEEEA!”,
or:
“WADEED! WADEEED! WADEED! WAAAADEED! WADEED MY DAUGHTER! WADEED MY DAUGHTER!
MY DAUGHTER WADEED! MY DAUGHTER WADEED! “
Some, old schoolers, merely shouted:
“NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE!”
The more innovative also caused their Helvetic cowbells to sound whilst keeping this up and sometimes adding loud requests for such things as dry cornflakes, the name of the hospital that they were in, the location of their money or another blanket to replace the one that they had just thrown off the bed.
One polite old man shouted out
“EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME!
Another slowly but loudly enunciated:
“URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS!”
Steve Allendripp had once taught in the schools and colleges of the ILEA, (Inner London Education Authority), in the long lost days of municipal socialist internationalism. Then there were reckoned to be two hundred languages spoken in London.
Municipal socialist internationalism may slumber now, in the deep cellars of County Hall, next to the sweet Thames, but it will be more insomniac than King Arthur and his nighty knights. It will spasm into life like a fresh Frankenstein cobbled together from barely feasible alliances amongst the chronically fissiparous British left. It will be spawned by nuclear waste traces in the river drifting downstream from some weapons research station unmarked on any map of Berkshire.
Municipal socialist internationalism will rise like Godzilla tearing upwards through the tanks of the aquarium above, smashing water tank walls and sending thrashing, gleaming, hydrodynamic sharks to shatter the windows of Coffee Shops and Noodle Bars and decapitate themselves a last meal of Tourist’s Head Soup before diving into the river.
Municipal socialist internationalism will quadrifurcate tourist hotels from within, a kilometre tall larva of future exploding out of a rotting marrow. Municipal socialist internationalism will march across the Thames to more wetly realise the fiery ambitions of Fawkes the papist Taliban. It will smash the four giants, (Poverty, Squalor, Ignorance and Disease), who are pandered to by suited parasites in the medieval shack on the north bank. It will do for Gog and MaGog too.
“FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE!” It will roar and pigeons will spiral up in dense grey flocks like clouds of smoke. Urban seagulls will squawk and fly off for awaydays by the sea; jets will fall out of the sky.
In the meantime as Steve Allendripp gets older and his dreams get madder, globalisation don’t stop and the jets still fly “Theyboris” want to build a new airport even on the mudflats of the Thames estuary which will eventually eat it. London sucks in cheap labour like a belching plughole together with babies, bathwater and anything else it can get. So by the early 21st there must be more than two hundred languages spoken in London, and fewer than ever understood.
Some Psychiatrists reckon that there is a window of opportunity in child hood, when, given some sort of multi-lingual environment, it is possible to speak and understand more than one language truly fluently. People can learn languages later but will still probably retain their older accents and maybe continue to think and dream in their mother tongues.
Steve Allendripp’s parents, particularly the Da, were Francophiles. Not surprising, when SA thought about it; Father had been born in 1902 and almost lived into the Nineties. Thankfully, he had not been into gung-ho heroism, lying about his age and volunteering for the Mincer; and Hitler had been stopped at Dunkirk; so he had been too young for the First and too old for the Second. However, he’d known enough of rationing and culture, and he’d been to Paris as an art student in his twenties, (when, legendarily, he didn’t have the twenty quid to buy a Gauguin print), to want what the French had i.e.; better weather, better cooking, and a more direct appreciation of sensual beauty perhaps (?).
Although Steve Allendripp’s parents were Francophiles, they were not Francophones, but they tried to remedy this by sending five year old Steve to the Français Lycée de Londres in South Kensington.
It seems that the sash cord on Steve Allendripp’s window of opportunity was well frayed by then, if not completely cut. He remembered a bleak brick walled playground hemmed in by tall buildings; being given dead white worms to eat and strange golden globules of oil on the soup. As soften in later life, people shouted at him in a language that he did not understand and then shouted more when he did not understand them.
Later on real Francophones told him that he had a decent accent; but either the slang of his contemporaries or anything more complex than a present tense, lost him. He did become a Francophile, (for much the same reasons that his parents had), but otherwise he was a monoglot clot.
Had he been born a decade earlier he might just have ended up in one of the messy wars that marked the end of the British Empire.; but instead of being sent off to shout at foreigners, they came to him London Schools and colleges to be shouted at, because the British Empire and succeeding neo-imperialist British foreign policies had made the nation behave like a hungry star fish, in that it had vomited up its stomach in the general direction of the rest of the world and then re-ingested this organ together with whatever it had managed catch in it.
F. Ransome- Kuti, the Nigerian politico-pop star had once reputedly harangued an audience in the Brixton Academy with words to the effect that: “No wonder they abolished slavery, you packed your suitcases and came over here on your own accord.” As any sensible study of migration will state, there are “push” and “pull” factors.
So, often there are old people on 21st century British hospital wards, scared of pain, in a strange place surrounded by strange people, bells, frog noises lights and machines. They get upset, very upset and some of them shout and shout, because they don’t know what the nurses and doctors mean and their children have brought them here and then gone off and left them.
It’s surely a coincidence of course, but there are people who get ghosted. Sometimes Steve Allendripp would sit and sleep in the sticky oilskin armchair that had been placed next to his hospital bed, because, when he laid down his head on the pillow he had only the thickness of a plastic curtain between himself and one of the noisy elderly.
As well as, but associated with Steve Allendripp’s parents’ Francophilia, had been settling as middle-class pioneers in a borough called Fulham in West London. Fulham is on the river and is bordered by some beautiful sweeps of the Thames; Father dreamt of painting some Impressionist views of these and indeed did so.
If you really want to know what “middle-class pioneers” means in the context of twentieth century London, you could read Mayhew or Rowntree, compare with the Chicago school of ethology, and see that London and Chicago, (and maybe New York too?), have urban differing “ecologies”, seemingly formed under the same pressures of globalisation driven migration
To a London based reader or film viewer, Chicago and/or New York can seem rigidly ethnically segregated in contrast to the fluid pussiness of the Great Wen. Maybe the market drove? When Steve Allendripp was a boy in the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s, one end of his street had been dead posh with cabinet ministers, and other dross, living in luxury riverside apartment blocks situated next to an exclusively priced tennis club and private park of what had once been a Victorian grandee’s mansion. The other end of the street had had a dairy with stables for its horses and a large commercial laundry, both with their attendant steamy stinks. There was a nearby noisy railway line; and a hundred yards further on, on the New Kings Road, there were fish and chip shops and a scrap metal merchants, with blackboard painted walls so that the latest prices of various types old iron could be chalked up. So homes at the north end of the road were cheaper, but each had three bedrooms and large private gardens, they attracted middle middle class families, who came displacing owner occupiers and the lonely old who had hung on in there. In price terms, the area became marked as ‘upcoming’ by Estate Agents and the whole borough got nicknamed ‘South Chelsea’ and the Invisible Hand pointed a shining path out to suburbs beyond the North and South Circulars and even the orbital motorway for whelks, cloth caps, dropped aitches, eel, pies mash and green liquor.
So Steve Allendripp spent a largely happy childhood in a home that shook from trains, stank from factories, (especially if the wind ever blew the whiff of Price’s candle factory in Battersea up the river), came to be underneath a jet flight path into Heathrow airport and on winter evenings sometimes echoed to the foghorns of the tugs towing trains of barges on the river; then it might be like being inside a gigantic bittern booming in a fen.
Given such early aural socialisation, it was perhaps unsurprising that as a hospital patient teetering on the brink of an earlyish old age, having an older person shout and scream repeatedly and incoherently inches away from his ear was something that Steve Allendripp, soon became able to sleep through; whereas the low concerned mutterings of night nurses and duty doctors might disturb him.
He might wake because the shouting had stopped. Ambulance persons and/or porters might be wheeling a bed out of the ward or wheeling another one in. A shouter would be transferred to another ward and the electronic amphibians would resume their futile mating songs. Cowbells would ring again in the high pastures of heaven.
But Steve got ghosted to another ward when he hadn’t made one peep out of line, but this was because he did not understand the nature of medical crevasses or the pressures and organisational soreness brought on by beds.
Sometimes the machinery on some hospital Wards can sound like it was designed by a man who spent many happy years next to some slough, listening, thrilled, to the trilled mating calls of its amphibian inhabitants. He was probably zonked out of his head on laudanum so he didn’t get the Dengue and didn’t feel it as the mossies drilled their probosci into his swamp-hardened hide.
But it could have been a woman who found the repeated chirruping vocalisations of frog testosterone comforting. In any event, whoever it was seemingly wished to impart the solace that they derived from such amphibian racket to others; perhaps more than anywhere else on Intensive Care Wards, where one can hear the peeping and beeping of the various electronic monitors that track hearts, pulses and intra and extra bodily fluid flows of many sorts.
Possibly the imaginary swamp margin dwelling computer noise designer , (or designers), had a Swiss colleague whose childhood joys and comforts came, not from proximity to fetid marshlife, but from the cool clean air of high summer alpine pastures, replete with leather-clad yodelling cattle herders herding leather-clad cattle, that had bells round their necks.
Swissperson gave bell-like sounds to the ECG machines attached to some patients in some wards. Each one like, the bells of the mountain kine, might ring with a different note from others or ring at a different pace to the others, depending on what which patient’s body did.
Above all the bells and frogs, in most adult wards, most patients seemed mostly silent save for the occasional cough or groan, but there often seemed to be those who had something to shout like:
“ADADGA! A BADGER! A GADGE! AGGAGGA! AAAA! AAAAAAAA! A DAGGER! A WEEEA! A WEEEA!”,
or:
“WADEED! WADEEED! WADEED! WAAAADEED! WADEED MY DAUGHTER! WADEED MY DAUGHTER!
MY DAUGHTER WADEED! MY DAUGHTER WADEED! “
Some, old schoolers, merely shouted:
“NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE!”
The more innovative also caused their Helvetic cowbells to sound whilst keeping this up and sometimes adding loud requests for such things as dry cornflakes, the name of the hospital that they were in, the location of their money or another blanket to replace the one that they had just thrown off the bed.
One polite old man shouted out
“EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME!
Another slowly but loudly enunciated:
“URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS!”
Steve Allendripp had once taught in the schools and colleges of the ILEA, (Inner London Education Authority), in the long lost days of municipal socialist internationalism. Then there were reckoned to be two hundred languages spoken in London.
Municipal socialist internationalism may slumber now, in the deep cellars of County Hall, next to the sweet Thames, but it will be more insomniac than King Arthur and his nighty knights. It will spasm into life like a fresh Frankenstein cobbled together from barely feasible alliances amongst the chronically fissiparous British left. It will be spawned by nuclear waste traces in the river drifting downstream from some weapons research station unmarked on any map of Berkshire.
Municipal socialist internationalism will rise like Godzilla tearing upwards through the tanks of the aquarium above, smashing water tank walls and sending thrashing, gleaming, hydrodynamic sharks to shatter the windows of Coffee Shops and Noodle Bars and decapitate themselves a last meal of Tourist’s Head Soup before diving into the river.
Municipal socialist internationalism will quadrifurcate tourist hotels from within, a kilometre tall larva of future exploding out of a rotting marrow. Municipal socialist internationalism will march across the Thames to more wetly realise the fiery ambitions of Fawkes the papist Taliban. It will smash the four giants, (Poverty, Squalor, Ignorance and Disease), who are pandered to by suited parasites in the medieval shack on the north bank. It will do for Gog and MaGog too.
“FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE!” It will roar and pigeons will spiral up in dense grey flocks like clouds of smoke. Urban seagulls will squawk and fly off for awaydays by the sea; jets will fall out of the sky.
In the meantime as Steve Allendripp gets older and his dreams get madder, globalisation don’t stop and the jets still fly “Theyboris” want to build a new airport even on the mudflats of the Thames estuary which will eventually eat it. London sucks in cheap labour like a belching plughole together with babies, bathwater and anything else it can get. So by the early 21st there must be more than two hundred languages spoken in London, and fewer than ever understood.
Some Psychiatrists reckon that there is a window of opportunity in child hood, when, given some sort of multi-lingual environment, it is possible to speak and understand more than one language truly fluently. People can learn languages later but will still probably retain their older accents and maybe continue to think and dream in their mother tongues.
Steve Allendripp’s parents, particularly the Da, were Francophiles. Not surprising, when SA thought about it; Father had been born in 1902 and almost lived into the Nineties. Thankfully, he had not been into gung-ho heroism, lying about his age and volunteering for the Mincer; and Hitler had been stopped at Dunkirk; so he had been too young for the First and too old for the Second. However, he’d known enough of rationing and culture, and he’d been to Paris as an art student in his twenties, (when, legendarily, he didn’t have the twenty quid to buy a Gauguin print), to want what the French had i.e.; better weather, better cooking, and a more direct appreciation of sensual beauty perhaps (?).
Although Steve Allendripp’s parents were Francophiles, they were not Francophones, but they tried to remedy this by sending five year old Steve to the Français Lycée de Londres in South Kensington.
It seems that the sash cord on Steve Allendripp’s window of opportunity was well frayed by then, if not completely cut. He remembered a bleak brick walled playground hemmed in by tall buildings; being given dead white worms to eat and strange golden globules of oil on the soup. As soften in later life, people shouted at him in a language that he did not understand and then shouted more when he did not understand them.
Later on real Francophones told him that he had a decent accent; but either the slang of his contemporaries or anything more complex than a present tense, lost him. He did become a Francophile, (for much the same reasons that his parents had), but otherwise he was a monoglot clot.
Had he been born a decade earlier he might just have ended up in one of the messy wars that marked the end of the British Empire.; but instead of being sent off to shout at foreigners, they came to him London Schools and colleges to be shouted at, because the British Empire and succeeding neo-imperialist British foreign policies had made the nation behave like a hungry star fish, in that it had vomited up its stomach in the general direction of the rest of the world and then re-ingested this organ together with whatever it had managed catch in it.
F. Ransome- Kuti, the Nigerian politico-pop star had once reputedly harangued an audience in the Brixton Academy with words to the effect that: “No wonder they abolished slavery, you packed your suitcases and came over here on your own accord.” As any sensible study of migration will state, there are “push” and “pull” factors.
So, often there are old people on 21st century British hospital wards, scared of pain, in a strange place surrounded by strange people, bells, frog noises lights and machines. They get upset, very upset and some of them shout and shout, because they don’t know what the nurses and doctors mean and their children have brought them here and then gone off and left them.
It’s surely a coincidence of course, but there are people who get ghosted. Sometimes Steve Allendripp would sit and sleep in the sticky oilskin armchair that had been placed next to his hospital bed, because, when he laid down his head on the pillow he had only the thickness of a plastic curtain between himself and one of the noisy elderly.
As well as, but associated with Steve Allendripp’s parents’ Francophilia, had been settling as middle-class pioneers in a borough called Fulham in West London. Fulham is on the river and is bordered by some beautiful sweeps of the Thames; Father dreamt of painting some Impressionist views of these and indeed did so.
If you really want to know what “middle-class pioneers” means in the context of twentieth century London, you could read Mayhew or Rowntree, compare with the Chicago school of ethology, and see that London and Chicago, (and maybe New York too?), have urban differing “ecologies”, seemingly formed under the same pressures of globalisation driven migration
To a London based reader or film viewer, Chicago and/or New York can seem rigidly ethnically segregated in contrast to the fluid pussiness of the Great Wen. Maybe the market drove? When Steve Allendripp was a boy in the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s, one end of his street had been dead posh with cabinet ministers, and other dross, living in luxury riverside apartment blocks situated next to an exclusively priced tennis club and private park of what had once been a Victorian grandee’s mansion. The other end of the street had had a dairy with stables for its horses and a large commercial laundry, both with their attendant steamy stinks. There was a nearby noisy railway line; and a hundred yards further on, on the New Kings Road, there were fish and chip shops and a scrap metal merchants, with blackboard painted walls so that the latest prices of various types old iron could be chalked up. So homes at the north end of the road were cheaper, but each had three bedrooms and large private gardens, they attracted middle middle class families, who came displacing owner occupiers and the lonely old who had hung on in there. In price terms, the area became marked as ‘upcoming’ by Estate Agents and the whole borough got nicknamed ‘South Chelsea’ and the Invisible Hand pointed a shining path out to suburbs beyond the North and South Circulars and even the orbital motorway for whelks, cloth caps, dropped aitches, eel, pies mash and green liquor.
So Steve Allendripp spent a largely happy childhood in a home that shook from trains, stank from factories, (especially if the wind ever blew the whiff of Price’s candle factory in Battersea up the river), came to be underneath a jet flight path into Heathrow airport and on winter evenings sometimes echoed to the foghorns of the tugs towing trains of barges on the river; then it might be like being inside a gigantic bittern booming in a fen.
Given such early aural socialisation, it was perhaps unsurprising that as a hospital patient teetering on the brink of an earlyish old age, having an older person shout and scream repeatedly and incoherently inches away from his ear was something that Steve Allendripp, soon became able to sleep through; whereas the low concerned mutterings of night nurses and duty doctors might disturb him.
He might wake because the shouting had stopped. Ambulance persons and/or porters might be wheeling a bed out of the ward or wheeling another one in. A shouter would be transferred to another ward and the electronic amphibians would resume their futile mating songs. Cowbells would ring again in the high pastures of heaven.
But Steve got ghosted to another ward when he hadn’t made one peep out of line, but this was because he did not understand the nature of medical crevasses or the pressures and organisational soreness brought on by beds.
The architectural criticism of Uriah Rhinepotts
The hospital itself was a TV star, especially the long, clean curves and arches of its main atrium. It would have had, in a better climate than a British winter, sunlight streaming down through it, as opposed to an occasional urban seagull dropping spattering on its windows, as another grey churning gale blew in more pointed winged scavengers in search of the discarded fried chicken cartons which were even easier find on the streets and pavements of early 21st century London than over-quota fish being thrown off the back of a seagoing trawler.
In the late 20th and early 21st century British and US TV loved detectives and doctors. Contemporary meritocrats who diced with death cheaply because they wore their own clothes, (mostly), and did not need to be adorned with spurious togs, togas, top hats and/or wigs. The tecs and docs did not need elaborately built sets or especially chosen locations to frown with actorly angst at the allegedly intense dilemmas concocted for them by scriptwriters: but scripts usually demanded longish sequences of walky-talking, and the atrium was just the place.
“….then Hartenheim was right-handed! He couldn’t possibly have used the secateurs…” One actor might explain.
“..and that means that Ealing roadway could be a red herring all along!” Another sage thespian would noddingly acknowledge, before a cut away to their grinning telegenic visages. Sooner or later, a chunk of synthetic but oozing, allegedly human liver, brain or lights will be shown in some television simulacrum of a ‘scientific’ laboratory signified by smoked glass panels and gleaming chrome. Once in a while you even got a scalpel shot with some gore splatter.
Some say that older British hospital buildings had more character and some say that they are more crowded and unhygienic and needed a large, poorly pad labour force to be available to clean nooks, crannies and other built in dirt traps.
The smooth linoleum floors of the post-modern TV star hospital are cold on the feet of poor old arthritic diabetics, such as Uriah Rhinepotts, and needed a smaller, contracted out, more poorly paid workforce.
So-called post-modern architecture is, Uriah has read, eclectic, almost arbitrary in its referencing of past styles, and the TV star hospital showed this characteristic markedly.
The airy atrium in some ways resembled the entrance hall of a large railway station or of a small airport; except that it had balconies and glazed interior windows overlooking it like a simulated Victorian shopping street in a theme park or a museum.
Whether airport, station or fake shopping centre, the atrium was different in atmosphere to the real interiors of such built locations. It took Uriah Rhinepotts some time to work out why, but eventually he cracked it. It was the only place that he had ever been where people behaved like the matchstickoid beings often depicted in architects’ drawings.
They moved slowly, (no matchstickoid ever went faster than a straight-baked normal walk, they seldom used crutches or wheelchairs in the architects’ drawings they, in the messier real TV hospital, they might employ such disability aids). They moved individually or in small groups in a criss-crossing pattern of purposes. Their conversation was a silent amorphous background hum of calmness, (no doubt brought on by the magic healing properties of the architecture). They were calmly and measuredly going about some business that they knew; not uncertain, hurried, anxious, alienated, anomic, atomic and individualistically pushy and ruthless like any normally, collectively psychotic, big city crowd.
And that was not the end of the wonders of the atrium. There were bridges across it and horizontal porches above doorways, which one could see from above, (if crossing one of the bridges in an orderly, well-mannered, fashion), were filled with shingle.
These suspended beaches might have some ergonomic reason behind them, as they could hardly be a geological tell tale of differing past sea levels, but when you put the whole lot together, including several huge polished wooden pseudo-abstract humanoid sculptures, the whole mishmash fried Uriah Rhinepott’s cultural circuits ’til they frazzled.
A potentially underwater shopping mall and art gallery that doubled as a passageway to waiting rooms, other limbos and , ultimately, death?
Yes, that’s what it was. It would ultimately fulfil the cynical archaeologists’ dictum that if you can’t tell what it’s for, it must be religious. This saying was now being partially reversed as some archaeologists were now guessing that Stonehenge was possibly a Neolithic hospital and/or healing shrine, rather than solely a straightforward temple.
In any event, when the robot diggers had mined the crust of urban seagull guano from about the remains of the TV star hospital and reached the layout of wards, corridors, lavatories, laboratories and many, many, many rusted machines, (perhaps with some plastic sinews still intact), another intelligent species might send its archaeologists and forensic scientists to ascertain what this sprawling edifice could have been.
A hospital? Or a healing shrine? Or a temple? They might guess: but probably never surmise that it was a TV star, even as the cameras roll on the actors, who are much more glamorous than the real docs and tecs, walky-talking about it.
In the late 20th and early 21st century British and US TV loved detectives and doctors. Contemporary meritocrats who diced with death cheaply because they wore their own clothes, (mostly), and did not need to be adorned with spurious togs, togas, top hats and/or wigs. The tecs and docs did not need elaborately built sets or especially chosen locations to frown with actorly angst at the allegedly intense dilemmas concocted for them by scriptwriters: but scripts usually demanded longish sequences of walky-talking, and the atrium was just the place.
“….then Hartenheim was right-handed! He couldn’t possibly have used the secateurs…” One actor might explain.
“..and that means that Ealing roadway could be a red herring all along!” Another sage thespian would noddingly acknowledge, before a cut away to their grinning telegenic visages. Sooner or later, a chunk of synthetic but oozing, allegedly human liver, brain or lights will be shown in some television simulacrum of a ‘scientific’ laboratory signified by smoked glass panels and gleaming chrome. Once in a while you even got a scalpel shot with some gore splatter.
Some say that older British hospital buildings had more character and some say that they are more crowded and unhygienic and needed a large, poorly pad labour force to be available to clean nooks, crannies and other built in dirt traps.
The smooth linoleum floors of the post-modern TV star hospital are cold on the feet of poor old arthritic diabetics, such as Uriah Rhinepotts, and needed a smaller, contracted out, more poorly paid workforce.
So-called post-modern architecture is, Uriah has read, eclectic, almost arbitrary in its referencing of past styles, and the TV star hospital showed this characteristic markedly.
The airy atrium in some ways resembled the entrance hall of a large railway station or of a small airport; except that it had balconies and glazed interior windows overlooking it like a simulated Victorian shopping street in a theme park or a museum.
Whether airport, station or fake shopping centre, the atrium was different in atmosphere to the real interiors of such built locations. It took Uriah Rhinepotts some time to work out why, but eventually he cracked it. It was the only place that he had ever been where people behaved like the matchstickoid beings often depicted in architects’ drawings.
They moved slowly, (no matchstickoid ever went faster than a straight-baked normal walk, they seldom used crutches or wheelchairs in the architects’ drawings they, in the messier real TV hospital, they might employ such disability aids). They moved individually or in small groups in a criss-crossing pattern of purposes. Their conversation was a silent amorphous background hum of calmness, (no doubt brought on by the magic healing properties of the architecture). They were calmly and measuredly going about some business that they knew; not uncertain, hurried, anxious, alienated, anomic, atomic and individualistically pushy and ruthless like any normally, collectively psychotic, big city crowd.
And that was not the end of the wonders of the atrium. There were bridges across it and horizontal porches above doorways, which one could see from above, (if crossing one of the bridges in an orderly, well-mannered, fashion), were filled with shingle.
These suspended beaches might have some ergonomic reason behind them, as they could hardly be a geological tell tale of differing past sea levels, but when you put the whole lot together, including several huge polished wooden pseudo-abstract humanoid sculptures, the whole mishmash fried Uriah Rhinepott’s cultural circuits ’til they frazzled.
A potentially underwater shopping mall and art gallery that doubled as a passageway to waiting rooms, other limbos and , ultimately, death?
Yes, that’s what it was. It would ultimately fulfil the cynical archaeologists’ dictum that if you can’t tell what it’s for, it must be religious. This saying was now being partially reversed as some archaeologists were now guessing that Stonehenge was possibly a Neolithic hospital and/or healing shrine, rather than solely a straightforward temple.
In any event, when the robot diggers had mined the crust of urban seagull guano from about the remains of the TV star hospital and reached the layout of wards, corridors, lavatories, laboratories and many, many, many rusted machines, (perhaps with some plastic sinews still intact), another intelligent species might send its archaeologists and forensic scientists to ascertain what this sprawling edifice could have been.
A hospital? Or a healing shrine? Or a temple? They might guess: but probably never surmise that it was a TV star, even as the cameras roll on the actors, who are much more glamorous than the real docs and tecs, walky-talking about it.
Friday, January 21, 2011
The Yellow Rubicon of Corduroy Pisser
Life changing internal revelations, such as St Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, can be ccompanied by potentially public events such as great claps of thunder and flashes of light.
Urinating uncontrollably inside a pair of beige corduroy trousers was not so spectacular for passers-by, especially as this took place on a crowded city street at night, but subjectively, to the corduroy trouser wearing urinator, it marked a significant aspect of lack of control, that he had not managed since completing potty training, some fifty four years ago.
Gripping part of a Victorian park railing, fashioned like an ornamental spearhead or a stylised flower; the urinator involuntarily let fly, or at least, did not resist the inception of a strong trickle. His stout beige pantaloon cloth and the urban darkness hid the micturation and nearby pedestrians were probably only able to see a fat man, possibly drunk or breathless, leaning on a fence, so they walked on by, not knowing that Corduroy Pisser was doing inside his clothes what he should have been doing behind a bush or a hedge, or in a public pissoir preferably.
Corduroy managed to bluff his way through the long bus journey back to his house somehow. Perhaps no-one was interested enough in his self-induced wetness to jeer at it. The wetland in his trousers was not a site of Special Scientific, or any other, interest. Bitterns had not yet started to breed in there.
Once he got off the bus, he had to stagger uphill along several hundred yards of suburban side roads. Every ten yards or so, something kept failing, his heart, or breath perhaps, his will-power certainly. So he stopped, leaning on plain fence posts, brown and creosoted, or square brick pillars. Each time he stopped, he pissed himself a little bit more.
This pissing was by no means was by no means unprecedented or unexpected, he had, after all, spent that evening beering in the central metropolis. This event, and the commuting that it entailed, had become increasingly common for him, and many others over the past decades as the price of housing had risen and blown localised groups of friends apart in migrations to the periphericity, leaving them atomised like lumps of debris scattered around a crater or a shell hole.
A past tactic to prevent uncontrolled pissing had been stop-offs at places like isolated garage doors, hypermarket hedges and other such locations that permitted a concealed Jimmy Riddle in the night. But tonight geography and circumstances had betrayed him. Busses and bladder had not coincided in such a way as to enable a covert al-fresco, therefore inside leg watering took place instead.
Afterwards, on drier days, Corduroy wondered if a solution might not have been carrying a collapsible portable Hansom carriage which could be whipped out and assembled at moments of need. A solution which would only work in London, assuming the truth of the urban legend that it was still legal for a male person to piss on the back wheel of such an antique vehicle
However this insight was not the one that accompanied the original pissing like an unheard thunderclap. Corduroy had realised that he could be drinking too much alcohol.
But did crossing the Yellow Rubicon of shame mean that there was no going back again? Sadly Corduroy doubted it. Arriving at this micturatory torrent had been a lifelong journey which had involved reaching, crossing and forgetting many of the tributaries of the Great Yellow One, (cradle of civilisations in beige cloth plains, home of vast hydro-electric schemes and tiny species of almost blind squeaking river dolphins). It certainly had involved a capacity to lie or at least, be diplomatically economical with the truth.
A string of counsellors and doctors had been fobbed off with unlikely estimates of how much alcohol Corduroy consumed regularly. Had any of them ever been true, his bladder control might not have worn out.
There were religious and medical people on both petty bourgeois sides of his family, so he tried, as a general principle not to lie too much, but, when it came to stating truthfully how much he drank, the truth always slipped away or perhaps a slight small cloud of mist drifted over it.
Education and literature were false friends here. If someone is taught a little bit about making philosophical evaluations of truth claims, a bit might rub off, in Corduroy’s case, this meant suspecting that all truth was debatable.
Also adolescent admiration for the work of William Burroughs did not encourage veracity in the presence of Doctor Foster or any other medical practitioner or pseudo-professional. The centipedal carapace of Burroughs’ slime-pile of work had been the necessity of doing the necessary to feed a habit and therefore telling a doctor whatever.
Doctors were inconsistent anyway, a possible co relation seemed to exist between their head scarf wearingness and propensity to issue absolute prohibitions against alcohol, rather than saying; “You’d better cut back a bit, old chap.” when the latter could mean five as opposed to six cans of strong cider a night.
With their close allies, the symptoms of age, the symptoms of alcoholism spread slowly, like a guerrilla army that controls most of the countryside at night, retreats in the day, but controls one square inch more territory every day. On a computer in a General’s office, one pixel lost might not look too bad, but territory once lost, was never given back.
Occasionally Corduroy Pisser had, as it were, “announced” things to himself and if really pushed or determined, he might make an “announcement” in the presence of witnesses; these “announcements” sometimes involved “turning over a new leaf” in some way, usually ineffectively.
About the most determined Corduroy had ever got was to attend some alcohol counselling interviews for about three months. But more often he devised some magic formula, known only to himself, whereby some types of alcoholic drink could be classified as “not really counting” as being alcoholic. He ratified such decisions by referring them to the SCPCP (Special Committee of Personas of Corduroy Pisser) and they had the satisfying consequence of enabling him to buy and consume alcoholic drink whilst, at the same time, giving it up. However adept though he was at self deception, it did become clear to him that when he drank the “not-drink” was actually what it was.
He had beaten an addiction once, almost by accident he had become unhooked from tobacco. He had got hold of little plastic dummies which could have nicotine cartridges put inside them and be sucked instead of cigarettes. These devices worked, for CP, because they looked, quite, but not very stupid. Had they been fashioned to look as though the device-user was, say, blowing up the arse or sucking the backside of a Little Grebe, not many people would have used them. However they just looked like someone had a short plastic tube in their mouth and in middle-class English society that was sufficient to cause conversation, which was embarrassing enough in and of itself. To avoid giving brief talks to strangers, friends and acquaintances about the short white plastic tube, tactics such as concealing it in a furled palm, furtively and rapidly whipping it out of a pocket , into the gob, and returning it , could be used. Eventually to was simpler not to use it at all.
So tobacco unaddiction had not involved declarations, decisions and rubicons, just a way of making the addict look silly to continue with the addiction. But if publically pissing yourself in a street would not do it, what would? Trouserlessness perhaps.
Urinating uncontrollably inside a pair of beige corduroy trousers was not so spectacular for passers-by, especially as this took place on a crowded city street at night, but subjectively, to the corduroy trouser wearing urinator, it marked a significant aspect of lack of control, that he had not managed since completing potty training, some fifty four years ago.
Gripping part of a Victorian park railing, fashioned like an ornamental spearhead or a stylised flower; the urinator involuntarily let fly, or at least, did not resist the inception of a strong trickle. His stout beige pantaloon cloth and the urban darkness hid the micturation and nearby pedestrians were probably only able to see a fat man, possibly drunk or breathless, leaning on a fence, so they walked on by, not knowing that Corduroy Pisser was doing inside his clothes what he should have been doing behind a bush or a hedge, or in a public pissoir preferably.
Corduroy managed to bluff his way through the long bus journey back to his house somehow. Perhaps no-one was interested enough in his self-induced wetness to jeer at it. The wetland in his trousers was not a site of Special Scientific, or any other, interest. Bitterns had not yet started to breed in there.
Once he got off the bus, he had to stagger uphill along several hundred yards of suburban side roads. Every ten yards or so, something kept failing, his heart, or breath perhaps, his will-power certainly. So he stopped, leaning on plain fence posts, brown and creosoted, or square brick pillars. Each time he stopped, he pissed himself a little bit more.
This pissing was by no means was by no means unprecedented or unexpected, he had, after all, spent that evening beering in the central metropolis. This event, and the commuting that it entailed, had become increasingly common for him, and many others over the past decades as the price of housing had risen and blown localised groups of friends apart in migrations to the periphericity, leaving them atomised like lumps of debris scattered around a crater or a shell hole.
A past tactic to prevent uncontrolled pissing had been stop-offs at places like isolated garage doors, hypermarket hedges and other such locations that permitted a concealed Jimmy Riddle in the night. But tonight geography and circumstances had betrayed him. Busses and bladder had not coincided in such a way as to enable a covert al-fresco, therefore inside leg watering took place instead.
Afterwards, on drier days, Corduroy wondered if a solution might not have been carrying a collapsible portable Hansom carriage which could be whipped out and assembled at moments of need. A solution which would only work in London, assuming the truth of the urban legend that it was still legal for a male person to piss on the back wheel of such an antique vehicle
However this insight was not the one that accompanied the original pissing like an unheard thunderclap. Corduroy had realised that he could be drinking too much alcohol.
But did crossing the Yellow Rubicon of shame mean that there was no going back again? Sadly Corduroy doubted it. Arriving at this micturatory torrent had been a lifelong journey which had involved reaching, crossing and forgetting many of the tributaries of the Great Yellow One, (cradle of civilisations in beige cloth plains, home of vast hydro-electric schemes and tiny species of almost blind squeaking river dolphins). It certainly had involved a capacity to lie or at least, be diplomatically economical with the truth.
A string of counsellors and doctors had been fobbed off with unlikely estimates of how much alcohol Corduroy consumed regularly. Had any of them ever been true, his bladder control might not have worn out.
There were religious and medical people on both petty bourgeois sides of his family, so he tried, as a general principle not to lie too much, but, when it came to stating truthfully how much he drank, the truth always slipped away or perhaps a slight small cloud of mist drifted over it.
Education and literature were false friends here. If someone is taught a little bit about making philosophical evaluations of truth claims, a bit might rub off, in Corduroy’s case, this meant suspecting that all truth was debatable.
Also adolescent admiration for the work of William Burroughs did not encourage veracity in the presence of Doctor Foster or any other medical practitioner or pseudo-professional. The centipedal carapace of Burroughs’ slime-pile of work had been the necessity of doing the necessary to feed a habit and therefore telling a doctor whatever.
Doctors were inconsistent anyway, a possible co relation seemed to exist between their head scarf wearingness and propensity to issue absolute prohibitions against alcohol, rather than saying; “You’d better cut back a bit, old chap.” when the latter could mean five as opposed to six cans of strong cider a night.
With their close allies, the symptoms of age, the symptoms of alcoholism spread slowly, like a guerrilla army that controls most of the countryside at night, retreats in the day, but controls one square inch more territory every day. On a computer in a General’s office, one pixel lost might not look too bad, but territory once lost, was never given back.
Occasionally Corduroy Pisser had, as it were, “announced” things to himself and if really pushed or determined, he might make an “announcement” in the presence of witnesses; these “announcements” sometimes involved “turning over a new leaf” in some way, usually ineffectively.
About the most determined Corduroy had ever got was to attend some alcohol counselling interviews for about three months. But more often he devised some magic formula, known only to himself, whereby some types of alcoholic drink could be classified as “not really counting” as being alcoholic. He ratified such decisions by referring them to the SCPCP (Special Committee of Personas of Corduroy Pisser) and they had the satisfying consequence of enabling him to buy and consume alcoholic drink whilst, at the same time, giving it up. However adept though he was at self deception, it did become clear to him that when he drank the “not-drink” was actually what it was.
He had beaten an addiction once, almost by accident he had become unhooked from tobacco. He had got hold of little plastic dummies which could have nicotine cartridges put inside them and be sucked instead of cigarettes. These devices worked, for CP, because they looked, quite, but not very stupid. Had they been fashioned to look as though the device-user was, say, blowing up the arse or sucking the backside of a Little Grebe, not many people would have used them. However they just looked like someone had a short plastic tube in their mouth and in middle-class English society that was sufficient to cause conversation, which was embarrassing enough in and of itself. To avoid giving brief talks to strangers, friends and acquaintances about the short white plastic tube, tactics such as concealing it in a furled palm, furtively and rapidly whipping it out of a pocket , into the gob, and returning it , could be used. Eventually to was simpler not to use it at all.
So tobacco unaddiction had not involved declarations, decisions and rubicons, just a way of making the addict look silly to continue with the addiction. But if publically pissing yourself in a street would not do it, what would? Trouserlessness perhaps.
The Revolting Door of Brian Edfour
As he worked his way from the status of “revolving door” patient, into the rarer “spin dryer” patient, Brian Edfour wondered what badges or emblems should adorn such medical recidivists, and whereabouts on their bodies these marks should be tattooed.
Perhaps a medical-type serpent chasing its own tail might do? Images of revolving doors or spin dryers themselves could, all too easily be totally non-descript or come to resemble dustbins; and either image could give authoritarians in authority bad ideas.
Possibly from such a perspective, it might be more appropriate to award the title of “revolting door patient” instead. It might well apply to Brian, and probably thousands of others, who each time they were discharged from the pristine(ish), servile(ish) and definitely over-regulated atmosphere of the British 21st century public hospital, passed through a door that was indeed a putrid portal, ghastly gate or adipose aperture granting ingress to illness.
Metaphorically, it was probably originally of a sickly bilious green colour, but its paintwork has been chipped, patched and scratched. Streaks of red, orange, purple and white undercoats, (or older topcoats), showed through.
The revolting door was stained, dented and smeared with boot-sole rubber and mud where it had been kicked or wedged open with feet. It had stains of liquid and perhaps even solid, or semi-solid excretion on it. It carried chisel and knife scarring around its lock, handle and frame. The letter box, if there was one, might well be painted over and nailed shut; or it might be a blatant oblong slot cut out of cheap, almost cardboard, wood.
This door provided notional concealment and privacy for Brian Edfour’s bad habits, the respectable populace passing by, might well hazard guesses at what went on behind it but did not want to pass through it and know.
Hospital was one of the few environments that Brian had ever found where other people would fetch and carry for him, however they seldom fetched or carried what he really wanted since he had no taste or craving for catheters, canullas, CAT scans and diuretics. Behind the revolting door, Brian fetched and carried more or less what he wanted for himself: which was alcohol in glass bottles, alcohol in plastic bottles, alcohol in cans and pies in foil trays, packaged in colourful boxes depicting deceptive deliciousness within.
Brian wanted alcohol and pies; although their packaging often attracted him that was not what he wanted. Once he had extracted the active ingredients, he hurled the containing components all around his dwelling until his diet hospitalised him again.
In hospital, they sometimes gave him pies, but only small ones and only occasionally. Alcohol was employed only as a cleaning agent and for starring roles in Brian’s dreams where beautifully packaged bottles of Bourbon cavorted around his subconscious singing enticing ditties about what they ought to taste like, but probably didn’t. Cheap cider and/or Rosso D’Origine Dubioso was usually what Brian’s budget would stretch to.
Long strong drinking had turned Brian’s very Id into an alcoholic consumerist. Short hospital stays lost him a bit of weight and afforded him some relief from the physical disabilities associated with his crap diet, but only temporarily, so he almost crawled out of the revolting door and in through the revolving door, more and more frequently.
Just as the pie/booze diet encrusted Brian Edfour with pustules and fat externally it also seemingly encrusted him with stuff internally, but no one seemed sure what this was. Brian fell unerringly into one of the bottomless crevasses that separates medical specialities and sadly for him it was not the narrow canyon between Pieology and Boozology. So when he went through the revolving door, he was sampled, swabbed, tested, prodded, poked and probed.
Tiny cameras were sent on fantastic voyages deep into the bowels of Brian from either end, as though safaris of Victorian explorers were seeking his source. Brian gagged and farted reflexively, but he could not keep them out or expel them and they shot footage of strange moist red things.
More and more such expeditions were proposed and sent and if the Respiratory guys had sent one then the Cardiac chaps would have to cap them and send another, poking something into a vein in case moist red things were up there too.
So Brian Edfour, the sort of addict, became, through some fault of his own, an exemplary consumer, an experimental pincushion and an awful moral exemplar, all at once. He ate and drank his way into becoming part of the tax burden on those who had to pay for his heath care, but in doing so gave these puritans a fat straw man to sneer and jeer at. He also thus stimulated demand, enterprise and inventiveness in the pharmaceutical industry and its close cousin, industrial food processing.
Thus Brian deserved a shiny medal of a steak and ale pie, gleaming with golden gravy, not some poxy tattoo of a dustbin.
Perhaps a medical-type serpent chasing its own tail might do? Images of revolving doors or spin dryers themselves could, all too easily be totally non-descript or come to resemble dustbins; and either image could give authoritarians in authority bad ideas.
Possibly from such a perspective, it might be more appropriate to award the title of “revolting door patient” instead. It might well apply to Brian, and probably thousands of others, who each time they were discharged from the pristine(ish), servile(ish) and definitely over-regulated atmosphere of the British 21st century public hospital, passed through a door that was indeed a putrid portal, ghastly gate or adipose aperture granting ingress to illness.
Metaphorically, it was probably originally of a sickly bilious green colour, but its paintwork has been chipped, patched and scratched. Streaks of red, orange, purple and white undercoats, (or older topcoats), showed through.
The revolting door was stained, dented and smeared with boot-sole rubber and mud where it had been kicked or wedged open with feet. It had stains of liquid and perhaps even solid, or semi-solid excretion on it. It carried chisel and knife scarring around its lock, handle and frame. The letter box, if there was one, might well be painted over and nailed shut; or it might be a blatant oblong slot cut out of cheap, almost cardboard, wood.
This door provided notional concealment and privacy for Brian Edfour’s bad habits, the respectable populace passing by, might well hazard guesses at what went on behind it but did not want to pass through it and know.
Hospital was one of the few environments that Brian had ever found where other people would fetch and carry for him, however they seldom fetched or carried what he really wanted since he had no taste or craving for catheters, canullas, CAT scans and diuretics. Behind the revolting door, Brian fetched and carried more or less what he wanted for himself: which was alcohol in glass bottles, alcohol in plastic bottles, alcohol in cans and pies in foil trays, packaged in colourful boxes depicting deceptive deliciousness within.
Brian wanted alcohol and pies; although their packaging often attracted him that was not what he wanted. Once he had extracted the active ingredients, he hurled the containing components all around his dwelling until his diet hospitalised him again.
In hospital, they sometimes gave him pies, but only small ones and only occasionally. Alcohol was employed only as a cleaning agent and for starring roles in Brian’s dreams where beautifully packaged bottles of Bourbon cavorted around his subconscious singing enticing ditties about what they ought to taste like, but probably didn’t. Cheap cider and/or Rosso D’Origine Dubioso was usually what Brian’s budget would stretch to.
Long strong drinking had turned Brian’s very Id into an alcoholic consumerist. Short hospital stays lost him a bit of weight and afforded him some relief from the physical disabilities associated with his crap diet, but only temporarily, so he almost crawled out of the revolting door and in through the revolving door, more and more frequently.
Just as the pie/booze diet encrusted Brian Edfour with pustules and fat externally it also seemingly encrusted him with stuff internally, but no one seemed sure what this was. Brian fell unerringly into one of the bottomless crevasses that separates medical specialities and sadly for him it was not the narrow canyon between Pieology and Boozology. So when he went through the revolving door, he was sampled, swabbed, tested, prodded, poked and probed.
Tiny cameras were sent on fantastic voyages deep into the bowels of Brian from either end, as though safaris of Victorian explorers were seeking his source. Brian gagged and farted reflexively, but he could not keep them out or expel them and they shot footage of strange moist red things.
More and more such expeditions were proposed and sent and if the Respiratory guys had sent one then the Cardiac chaps would have to cap them and send another, poking something into a vein in case moist red things were up there too.
So Brian Edfour, the sort of addict, became, through some fault of his own, an exemplary consumer, an experimental pincushion and an awful moral exemplar, all at once. He ate and drank his way into becoming part of the tax burden on those who had to pay for his heath care, but in doing so gave these puritans a fat straw man to sneer and jeer at. He also thus stimulated demand, enterprise and inventiveness in the pharmaceutical industry and its close cousin, industrial food processing.
Thus Brian deserved a shiny medal of a steak and ale pie, gleaming with golden gravy, not some poxy tattoo of a dustbin.
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