9.8.09 | Why God Fearing Americans Should Fear The NHS
"I say bartender chap, when i ordered a stiff drink, i wasn't expecting to be handed one you could plant a bleedin' flag in!"
Nurse 1: "Tee hee"
The Saturnyne adopting best leer: "Do you come here often, daaahlin'?"
Nurse 2 thinking quickly: "Every day"
The Saturnyne: "Sooo. You actually want me to swallow this radio-active jizz, do you?"
Nurse 2: "No, we want you to swallow this bicarbonate of soda, so you'll feel decidedly gassy and bloated, then swallow the radio-active jizz, which is incidentally the product of elephants. Gay elephants. And hopefully you'll acquire a taste for being gay and all things manly, or possibly elephantly because that is the secret agenda of the UK National Health Service, which we hope to export to the poor unknowing redneck fools of the USA and turn the entire population queer! And possibly commie at the same time. At the very least, men will like gay elephants more, for sure! BwaHAAAHAHaaahahaaaaa!"
Nurse 1: "And while you're swallowing our gay jizz, we'll be standing behind this lead proof screen, and irradiating the shit out of your body with x-rays to give you cancer, because you don't look nearly gay enough for our liking."
The Saturnyne: "Ni-iice. Should be piss-easy, then."
(Time passes)
Nurses 1 and 2: "Mr Saturnyne? Mr Saturnyne? Are you feeling ok? You looked like you were going to faint there for a moment. Are you ready to take a sip of your Barium Meal?
The Saturnyne: "Wha? Uh? Oh right... you didn't say anything about elephants just then, did you, lovely nurse persons? Also... "meal"? Buckets of elephant jizz is a meal now?"
Nurses look at each other bemused: "Er no. We're ready to take your x-ray when you are, Mr Saturnyne"
The Saturnyne: "Right then. Yummy. Bottoms up".
Nurses quietly to themselves: "BwaHAAAHAHaaahahaaaaa! Our evil plan is working. He sounds gay already"
So you see, America... the NHS is an evil commie conspiracy to turn all the men of your country into gay, commie loving, surrender monkeys. Who possibly eat cheese. Gay cheese. Resist now, while you have breath in your body! Resist!!!
And last month, they had me deep-throating a long tube with a camera on, into my stomach. And you wouldn't believe the amount of gas that causes! Tip: if youever find yourselves undergoing this procedure you should definitely concentrate on breathing... otherwise you'll be having 15 minutes of near panic with a tube inside you that could cause damage if you try and pull it out... even worse if you suddenly wonder if you're being indoctrinated into Dorothy Friendship!
Next up: The anal probe! I shall resist on your behalf, My American friends! Wish me luck!
S.
PS: Oh, and the hospital gowns!- i forgot to mention how "sexy" and backless they are. I praise the day Mr CK started making his saucy boxers, or i'd have been standing there, flashing unromantic y-fronts, and hairy calves, with just my South Park socks to give me comfort in an awkward situation... to slightly quote that nice Mr Wodehouse "While not exactly being disgruntled, he was quite a long way from being gruntled"
Re: camera and stomach - I took the drugs. Lotsa drugs and bloody good they were too! Then I ate an entire packet of Rich Tea biscuits and spent the following 24hrs barfing...
Oh yeah, and no drugs for Mr Saturnyne... and incidentally the conversations were all true... i really did say those things, much to the hysteria of the 2 nurses and the evil x-ray machine operator. And they told me i was the most entertaining and polite patient they'd ever given cancer to.
I would have bowed, but i fear my gown would have revealed far too much for good taste at that point... pity i wasn't wearing a cap, though. I could have doffed it.
Some things never change, or change so slowly and subtly that we may live all our lives without seeing that our parents faces are not so radiant and joyful as they once were, but instead lined and careworn and tired from a lifetime of troubles, or the tiny seed we planted all of 30 summers ago, has grown proud and tall with many roots and branches, leaves and twigs. Swaying and bending to the masterful wind, it harbours a whole mini-ecosystem of it's own within the wider world. Often we only notice it when it is broken and thrown to the ground, usually by human vandals. Or disease takes it and withers. I suspect humanity has an inadvertent uncaring hand in that, too. Or you can blame God if you want, but i have it on good knowledge that God gave us free will and is probably wondering why we're wasting it all on shopping and indolence.
Some things never change. Take Harle Syke, where i was born and live. Perched on a tall hill overlooking the town of Burnley, on a clear day you can see halfway to Manchester. If you venture to the top of the hill and Haggate, you can see Nelson and perhaps Colne too, and stretching for mile upon mile eastwards, the bleak and beautiful moors that divide Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Every day, the sun rises from behind the hill and moorland, and sets far, far to the west beyond Crown Point. The milkman delivers at 5:30 in the morning, the postman a few hours later. The blackbird sings from the telegraph pole, the starling mimics from the rooftops and the hoary old rooks leave their roost in pairs on their long days of foraging to return as the sun sets. The road through the centre of Harle Syke has now been there for centuries and may well last for a couple more... except perhaps not. As i muse on this blog posting, i think how much my large cotton-mill village has changed over the past 30 years.
As a child, i watched the green fields between the village and Burnley be eaten up by twisting, turning mazes of housing. We're now to all intents and purposes, a suburb. The thrumming cotton mill's have grown silent with their many proud chimneys reduced to two. Neither of which are in use any more, save as memento's of the past. The things which make the place a community are dwindling fast. I remember at least two bakeries, 2 newsagents, 2 butchers, 2 chip shops, 3 grocers, 1 greengrocer, 1 off-license, a haberdashery, 2 hair-dressers, a post office, a bank, a bookmakers, an ironmongers, 2 butchers, a chemist and 3 very exciting sweet shops selling a variety of kayli (you know, the flavoured sugar/sherbert stuff) and goodness knows what else in glass jars, but it all seemed yummy to eat (and well, they seemed to be sweet shops... as a child you don't really look at the other stuff much.)
Then the super-markets came... and out of town shopping. Things designed to make lives convenient and easy. From the local Spar shop which tries to sell everything to the 3 great super-markets that have enclosed Burnley in a vice-like death-grip.
Harle Syke now has, 1 butcher, 2 hair-dressers, 1 newsagent, 1 chip shop, 1 chemist and a sandwich shop, oh and a kebab/curry shop which i never visit as i'm not a big fan of Indian cuisine alas, with everything else being hoovered up by The Spar. All the little shops with their bustling shoppers passing the time and getting to know one another have long since gone. There's no reason to walk down certain streets now, and no need to meet people. I don't know hardly any of the people on my street any more. They get out of their front door and jump into their cars and they're gone. If you're lucky, you might get a wave and a hello.
Harle Syke feels like a macrocosm of Burnley, which is suffering the same malady that blights the rest of my country.
Super-markets.
Since a Tesco's opened near the bus station, the town centre has been trapped within a Bermuda Triangle of doom (Tesco's, Sainsbury's and Asda) for the small shop-keep. The recession and rules on smoking in bars plus the violence of the mememe youth generation will make it like a ghost town within the next decade i think. And everyone's too apathetic to try and stop it.
Everywhere i look ,there are To-Let signs up on shops, and the new ones are quickly fleeced into receivership or bankruptcy by landlords pushing rents through the roof, even in the midst of recession. Or by lack of customers... fine products won't save you here. The Super-Markets want to sell everything.
Even Woolworths, which is at the very centre of our town has died.
Late one evening in February, i had cause to be walking from here to there behind the back of the shopping precinct. There's a kind of underground car park there, that touches the back of Woolworths.
I stopped a moment and listened to the tannoy that plays music all night long, and it seemed to me as i stood there, that i heard the echoing ghost voices of all the dead shops and the once-mighty Woolworth's store, hearking back to happier days when people once bought their wares and filled the town with life and warmth. Hopeful and sad all at once. I'm not sure of the song... but i think i would have liked it to be the one i link below.
I turned away and for the first time in my life, wished that i lived anywhere else in the universe, than this town and this country that unravels and twists slowly into a parody of itself and feels like a prison. One we all entered willingly into.
9.5.09 | Blue, Birthday, Bath. Spider, Sleeping and Sound. Blue and Fluffy
I celebrated my Nth birthday recently... gah!
It started nicely with a rescue of a tiny spider i found in my bath. Usually any insects venturing into my bathroom are taking their lives in their... um... Pincers? Claws? Leggy things? And indeed i did make a preliminary assault on it with a hopefully quick clean drowning... but alas it evaded the swirling waters in a mad panic... and seeing that, i paused and felt a twinge of guilt at my attempted murder. The guilt increased as the poor wee thing then sat seemingly resigned to it's fate in the centre of the killzone...
"No!" i suddenly decided in a Groundhog Day moment. "No! No creature shall die in my general vicinity on this day while i can help it! (although i reserve the right to genocide if anything lands on my food or disturbs me during those tender private moments of human life)"
Which was a bit of a pisser as i'd planned to go and kill loads of stuff today. Ah well...
So i got all anglic on its ass, threw it into a cup, gave it a free ride to the outdoors, threw it out of the cup and then tottered sleepily back indoors all beatific and smug with myself to await the milkman before zipping off to bed. It's a goood day!
But then the bastard milkman decided to be on holiday, leaving his milk-round in the hands of lesser mortals.... who then, deliberately -deliberately, i say!- and with great malice, then decided to leave the wrong kind of milk. I know what you're thinking. you're thinking "how dare they?!?! String them up! I shall write to my MP forthwith and have them hung on poor Mr The Saturnyne's behalf before the day is out!"
Gah!
Troubled with my now less-than-saintly thoughts, i still managed to start my cameras sky project before going miserably to bed with added thoughts of a quality-milk-free birthday.
Only to be awakened 2 hours later by some bastard on a fork-lift truck vrooming around and picking things up... all fucking day long! Which was very unsporting of him. I let him know the extent of my anger by waving my fist through the curtains at him while shoving the pillow over my head with the other hand.
Well, that's my day completely fucked. Was meant to go out to a friends in the evening, but such is my tiredness by 4pm, that i fall utterly asleep and don't wake up until 6pm the next day.
Double-Gah!!!
Anyway.... above is the birthday pic i took for my sky project (this one from my camera-phone)... am aiming for subtle, with the drama being in the viewers own eye.
but then again, skies have a way of showing you things. Below is a sky pic i sent to da Pumpkin, taken on the morning of her birthday. I think i shall do this with all my friends from now on.
4 comments :.
{illyria} hollered thusly:
Sian hollered thusly:
Re: camera and stomach - I took the drugs. Lotsa drugs and bloody good they were too! Then I ate an entire packet of Rich Tea biscuits and spent the following 24hrs barfing...
Good to hear from you lovely boy.
Take care, GD xx
Just what sort of drugs were you on...?!
;-)
Gotta love those gowns.
ps I'm not American. Hope you don't mind me gatecrashing.
lovely, doll... you conjure such romantic times....
and Terri, yes i mind! (but only in the nicest possible way ofc...)
S.
Oh yeah, and no drugs for Mr Saturnyne... and incidentally the conversations were all true... i really did say those things, much to the hysteria of the 2 nurses and the evil x-ray machine operator. And they told me i was the most entertaining and polite patient they'd ever given cancer to.
I would have bowed, but i fear my gown would have revealed far too much for good taste at that point... pity i wasn't wearing a cap, though. I could have doffed it.
S.
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