Friday 24 July 2009

I had to go back to hospital for an update on my unidentified condition. I was referred to the Urology waiting room which was a dark fresh hell, peopled with mad folk. A nurse very promptly took me into a consultation room and began to measure the circumference of my stomach at a somewhat arbitrary point between my nipples and my belly button.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked, since it’s never been a requirement in my previous examinations.
‘I have been asked to!’ she replied somewhat brusquely, repeatedly asking me if I had properly relaxed my stomach before she notated her findings.
I was then given a sample jar and sent off to a private cubicle to provide my urine. Then I returned to Dante’s comfy chair area and was greeted by a tannoy which informed me that all doctor’s appointments were running one hour late.
I watched the fish in a disconcertingly grimy tank swimming back and forth, and took out my book figuring that I could get maybe three chapters in before I was called. However, my name came up almost immediately. They never get it right, but it’s near enough that I can recognise myself.
The consultant was a very cute Indian man who went through my notes and quite cheered me up initially by telling me that there was nothing wrong with my blood, blood pressure, liver, lungs, kidneys and white blood cell count. Microbiology had been through my fluids with a micro-tooth comb of the finest degree and could find nothing.
I have therefore been diagnosed as having an Idiopathic something-or-other. ‘Idiopathic,’ he said, with a wide smile, ‘means we don’t know what it is.’
So… He was toying with the idea of putting me on steroids, just for a laugh I suspect, but plumped, after a word with yet another consultant in the next room, for referring me to a specialist in Things-They-Know-Nothing-About, which I imagine is a Professor of Idiopathology.
From there I escaped into Praed Street and headed for a café. I had a cappuccino, which I strongly suspect was instant coffee with some frothed milk and chocolate stuck on top like a posh wig on Britney.
Later, the Ugly One and I met up in Wetherspoons in Shepherds Bush from whence we went to see ‘Harry Potter and the Arse of the Bandersnipe’ or ‘ Harry Potter and the Half-Tone Prints’ or… anyway, it was OK. Long, but OK.
Dumbledore is gay, as JK Rowling confirmed some time ago. That’s hardly news. A quick look round his study would leave no one in doubt. And as for Professor Snape…. There’s no wife and two wizardlings waiting at home there. Mark my words!
At home, in bed, my thoughts turned, not to the aesthetics of wizardish cinema, or the social implications of being the gay headmaster of a school of magic, but to the fact that I had not asked the consultant why the nurse was measuring my stomach in such an eccentric manner.