Hardly a leg to stand on

I thought I’d go to A & E around 4.30 on Saturday afternoon; beat the evening rush of drunks and domestics. Of course, it was carnage: blood, sweat and tears everywhere. Talk about night of the living dead. Mostly men in sports kit and mainly head/eye injuries from what I could make out. Apart from the age range, it appeared as though they might have all been participating in the same event. Actually, the two lads from a posh private school in Oxford, dressed in wasp colours, had been at the same match and had gone for the same ball …one had the lump in his forehead, the other the indentation in his. They were conversing with a boy from the home team whose mother told me she watched every game, not because she likes rugby but so she could be on hand to take her son to hospital. She said he’d been there so often that she was surprised not to have been arrested for child abuse. I suggested she might well have been had it not been for the fact he’d got Canford embroidered on his socks.

Old Bill was in there too causing mayhem in his motorised car. ( Not THE old Bill ) He didn’t look much different from his usual environment in the smoking area outside the bingo although I did note a small plaster on his head. No, all in all, I think I was the healthiest looking specimen in the place. Non-affiliated shorts, tee-shirt and flip-flops and hardly resembling the walking wounded; certainly the best-read patient…Far From the Madding Crowd (though not in practice) versus the Sun and Closer. What do you mean – snob?

When I finally went through to the treatment room, they said it was difficult to reconcile my x-rays with the reality; surprised I was able to carry all that weight. Pardon? If it hadn’t been for the fact that everyone else had come as entrants in a Cyclops look-alike competition, we might well have assumed they’d got the x-rays muddled up. Sadly, they were mine and that was my broken foot. I sent a message to the man-child who was waiting outside with the hangover from hell. The wording of the text was akin to one he might have sent me the night before i.e. I’m getting plastered!

So now he’s playing nurse and already getting stroppy. He asked me to make a list of what was needed for the week. Easy: Radio Times, 200 fags and top-up my phone please. He was erring more on the food side it seems. Oh well, in that case, some red wine?