In Which I Hope That's Chocolate Ice-Cream They're Eating!

Today, I went to my local optician instead of going to one of those big chains. It had been seven years since I'd been to that particular one, but it took me rather less time to remember why there had been such a hiatus. Back in the day, they used to have this lens plastic swing on a bracket jobbies that I'm not very good at describing. Apparently they're called refractorheads. The point is, they'd done away with these and got some much cheaper metal glass rim jobbies (ha!) which were somewhat unpleasant, to say the least. They'd actually managed to downgrade this piece of equipment to such a level that it was like an instrument of torture from the past. Or the future:

They didn't go quite as far as to show me two girls and one cup. “Do the women who are doing unmentionable things look clearer with the first?... Or second?...” Still, it made a bad feeling in the guttywuts right horrorshow. Ha! Microsoft spelling and grammar utterly spazzed out with that last sentence- perhaps it's not a fan of A Clockwork Orange. The point remains though that the facilities at this place were more than a little rudimentary. Still, that's all fine. Costs have to be cut somewhere, and I was helping the little guy.

I had gone there because of a persistent ache in my left eye, feels like it's strained or bruised. The optometrist took note of my symptoms and got this suspiciously evil looking contraption out... “Okay, I'm going to use this magic squirty thing to gauge the pressure in your eye... Don't worry if your eye hurts when this shoots into it and takes a reading, that'll just be the asbestos.” “Wha- ARGGHHHH!!!” “The pressure seems normal.” “Why on earth would you put asbestos in there?!?” “You don't want your eye to catch fire, do you?” “Erm... No?” “Well then.” Eventually, he told me that I'd got a little bit blinder but that there's nothing visibly wrong with my eye apart from a tiny allergic reaction to asbestos. “Come back in a couple of weeks if your eye's still feeling dodgy, and we can at least squirt some asbestos in the other one so they look as shit as each other... But now I want you to talk to a woman who might well get commission, which would certainly explain her sneering and unhelpful attitude if you decide to not purchase her wares.” So off I trotted to someone who we shall call Mutton-Dressed-as-Lamb-Bitch. Mutton-Dressed-as-Lamb-Bitch seemed very proud of the 10 glasses that she stocked, and unaware of their astronomical prices. I tried on one or two, and noted with mild surprise that they didn't make me look any more of a twat than usual. Still, I could do better, and cheaper. I said to her that I would go further afield to Colchester to get my spectacles. Mutton-Dressed-as-Lamb-Bitch was not exactly enamoured with that idea. “You fucking what? You're a fucking idiot!” “Eh?” “My fragile little mind simply cannot cope with the idea of someone getting an eyetest at one opticians and then getting glasses from another! That's like cheating, you adulterous little shit! Would you ever go to a different pharmacy or go and see another hairdresser behind your regular one's back?!?” “...Erm...” “You would as well, you little bastard! What if the other opticians have a problem?!? You'd be caught between here and there in some sort of purgatorial netherworld!” “What sort of problem with my eyes could possibly cause a schism between two optician firms?” You know, a problem!" “Well, I'm going to give them my prescription from here and they'll recognise that the optometrist has been to optician's school and trust his judgement. If there is a problem, I'm sure their vast wealth would be able to purchase something or someone to sort it out, or provide me with ample compensation.” I'd just like to say, the above may have been paraphrased an eensy bit, but the following is a direct quote of Mutton-Dressed-as-Lamb-Bitch: “We'd rather you didn't do that in future. It would be better if you don't come here again.” I'm inclined to agree with her.

Today's Tune

In Which I Give Another Brief History Lesson

Right, I said I was going to write this DAYS ago. It's a little known story about military co-operation between the U.K and France. Back in the day, there was this bloody enormous U.S.S.R armed force ready to come steamrolling through western Europe from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary... The western powers weren't entirely happy about that. They'd just had a nasty little spat with the Nazis, and another dictatorship invading sovereign European territories just wasn't on. The idea that the western powers should form a super happy fun club with which to buck a potential Soviet attack was hit upon- everyone foots the bill, an armed force to which all the members would contribute. This was a new era of co-operation, and though it came out of something negative, it's quite nice there was a group of foreigners working together. Well. Apart from the French of course. They realised they were not super, happy or fun, and as such started to get the hump with everyone else. When everyone else in NATO was trying to pull together, the French insisted on calling it Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique Nord, which spells OTAN, which is, if you haven't spotted it, the palindrome of NATO. I'm not sure that the French could come up with a better demonstration that they are, quite literally, backward people.

In 1958 France's premier was a bloke called Charles de Gaulle, perhaps the most self-interested ungrateful bastard to have an airport named after him. I cannot fully explain what was wrong with him without going into pages of detail, so let's work with the idea he was a tosspot. So. De Gaulle was galled by how involved the Americans were with NATO. How dare they commit loads of men and billions of dollars to defending people who most likely don't speak their language on a continent thousands of miles away. How DARE they?!? I suspect that the real issue de Gaulle may have had is that the Americans speak the same language as the British. De Gaulle never forgave the other Allies for taking the credit for liberating France. The 83,115 British and Canadian troops and the 73,000 U.S troops that landed on D-Day were just faffing about, it was clearly the mammoth 177 French soldiers that turned the tide of the battle.

Another thing of note in World War 2 is that after France surrendered to the Nazis, not all of France was occupied. The Nazis said “Basically, you can run half the country without involvement from us, as long as you round up Jews and send them to death camps.” Some French asked “Is it alright if we fight for the Nazis too? It's just that they're fighting the English, and we hate those beef eating victory monkeys.” “Oh, go on then,” said the Nazis, “as long as your capital city is Vichy.” As you may know, the war didn't end that well for the Vichy French, so when France became France again, she reluctantly put Marshal Pétain on trial. He was the leader who had collaborated with the Nazis. The judges at this trial said something along the lines of “Ah, let him off, we know it's an open and shut case but he didn't REALLY mean it”, yet the jury decided (by only one vote!) to put him to death. De Gaulle decided that this was a little bit too much- after all, Pétain had ensured the deaths of thousands of French Jews, it's not like he did anything really nasty. Pétain's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. At the time of sentence, he was 89.
Sorry, got sidetracked there. What I was meaning to say is that de Gaulle got all nostalgic for the days when France could bend over backwards for dictatorships, and if the USSR invaded, then the other members of NATO might frown a bit on a fellow member trying to negotiate a separate peace with the Soviets or surrender to them. France dropped out of NATO, but sadly the Russians never invaded so France didn't get the chance to surrender to them. The Soviet Union disbanded in 1991, but all the NATO countries thought that they were all mates now and it would be a shame to break up the party, so NATO carried on. In 2009, the French asked “Are you sure the USSR has been defeated? Really? No?” After being told that they most certainly had, the French finally put their head above the parapet and rejoined NATO, on the grounds that they could be snotty about it and not really get into the spirit of things.

So here's the little known story about the French working with the U.K. The British have an agreement with the Americans that their submarines shouldn't really be in the same place at the same time, because things might get a bit crashy. They have a system called deconfliction, which is a tad like air traffic control- the subs know roughly where each other are (if not exactly) so that they can't be dangerously close to each other. I think this approach is prudent, partially because the damage caused to submarines from being crashy doesn't just buff out like when you ding your Nissan Micra. The reason I most think it's a sensible idea, though, is because it's a teeny bit dangerous to have submarines carrying nuclear warheads not knowing where other submarines carrying nuclear warheads are.

The French disagreed. My command of French is not great, but I shall attempt to translate what I overheard from a drunk French admiral in a London whorehouse:
“I'm sure that we'll be able to see any other submarines coming even though we don't have any windows and our periscope doesn't work underwater, and that a submarine's main point is to be as undetectable as possible simply is not relevant. There is literally no way we can possibly crash into another submarine.”

Sure enough, in the same year that France rejoined NATO, she crashed one of her submarines into HMS Vanguard, and both were carrying nuclear warheads. This could have been a catastrophic encounter- both subs might have sunk and the missile casings could have broken and caused the irradiation of the Atlantic. The French submarine shrugged its shoulders, brushed herself down and said “Well, you should have been lookeeng where you were go-eeng, English.” The British sub had to put back into her home port to try and rid her of the garlicy smell she had inexplicably picked up. Hmm. If it's one thing I've learned from all of this, it would be that the French think that risking poisoning a great big chunk of the food chain is an acceptable price for not having to work with the Royal Navy. Still, they DID make Asterix in Britain, and that's a great film.

Today's Tune

In Which I Cannot Keep Bleeding Love

Disaster! I found out today that I have lost the means of feeling smug and generally thinking of myself as being a better person than most others. Epileptics cannot donate their blood. Now whenever my hero implores me to do something amazing, his words will turn to ash in my ears. To be fair, the nurses were very apologetic. "I'm awfully sorry, but if you give blood that may well result in hypoxia in the brain and cause you to have a stroke and die, and that's here on the check list of "Things we don't want to happen at a blood donation session." After I was told all of this, I was leafing through the compulsory literature (the chosen book for this session of blood donation was The Great Gatsby) and looking at all the things I wasn't going to be screened for- syphilis, HIV (always a favourite), HTLV and the hepatitis alphabet. I had planned to contract those at some point to see if the NHS blood screening system was any good, but the best made plans of mice and men...

The other day, I went to the registrar to request a copy of my birth certificate, because some idiot managed to lose the other one (that idiot may have been me). The certificate not to remind me where I was born, or when my mother's birthday is, but it's the first step in getting a new passport. Whilst it actually says on a birth certificate that it isn't proof of identity, it's the proof of identity that you need to get proof of identity. I was chatting with the registrar (she's from Kendal in Cumbria and thinks that Cockermouth is rough) whilst writing the information on the form. I commented on the fact that it seems a wee bit easy to just find out the names of someone's parents, their birthdays and then get their birth certificate and steal their identity. "Yeah, it's public records for you isn't it. It's a bloody terrible system." There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the author's mind.

Today's Tune

In Which I Prove I'm Not Unshockable

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In Which I Am Visited by the Ghosts of NHS Past, Present and Future

Yesterday, when S was driving me home, she asked me for a mention in here due to the fact that she is an avid fan of this blog. Someone has to be, I suppose. But I told her in no uncertain terms that if she wasn't going to pull over and show me her tits or do some other noteworthy thing like writing off her car, I wouldn't include her. She did neither, so I won't.


Today I had a couple of NHS encounters. Those guys just can't get enough of me. Recently, my GP had implored me to get a flu jab, saying that he would be crying himself to sleep if I shuffled off this mortal coil due to something as preventable as flu. Popped down to the Health Centre, was ushered very quickly into a room where there was a nurse and a woman who may have been a doctor, but I didn't recognise her. She asked me for my name and my doctor, and I told her my surname. I thought that would be enough as there can't have been that many people with an appointment at 11:47 who have my moniker and GP. “Do you have a first name as well?” “Nah, I'm like Madonna or Cher.” “What, you're a gay icon?” “I'd rather be a gay icon than someone who looks like their face has been on fire and been extinguished by a fork...” “You know, we could inject air into your bloodstream, you little shit, and that'll be game over for you. We'll just say you died from a stroke.” And that's why I didn't get a flu vaccination, and not because I'm afraid of needles.


My second and more accurately disclosed encounter with the NHS (I'm not afraid of needles, I'd be a terrible heroin addict if I was) was through the medium of a letter. What the NHS now tend to do is send a copy of each in-house letter regarding the patient to the patient... Transparency and all that. So today I got such a letter sent to me that was typed by Doctor Bastard, or his secretary. Anyway, whoever it was didn't seem to be willing or capable of operating the spelling and grammar function- I noticed five mistakes. I can get past that. Here are my issues with it. Firstly, it's a copy of a letter sent to a GP at my local surgery. However, it wasn't sent to MY GP. I have no idea why. Secondly, those of you who have been paying attention to this increasingly unhealthy saga will remember that since being diagnosed with probable gluten intolerance back in August, I have stayed clear of the stuff. However, and I quote Dr Bastard exactly; “...I had asked the endoscopy staff to advise him to be on a normal diet.” This never filtered through to me, so either Doctor Bastard never told Endoscopy, or they never told me. I'd prefer to think that Doctor Bastard fucked up, on account of him being a bastard. I'm no doctor, but telling someone who you think is allergic to something and has a lot of exposure to that something to carry on about their daily lives seems to carry the whiff of sadism. “We reckon you're probably allergic to peanuts and will go into anaphylactic shock if you encounter them, Mr Smith.” “Should I pack in my job down at the peanut packing plant then?” “Best not quit that, Mr Smith, as we need to find out whether our diagnosis is correct.” Or; “Hello Mr Bloggs, we think you could be fatally allergic to bees. Could you help us work out if that's the case by having sex with this hive? Sir, what are you doing?!? Please, practise safe sex and put a condom on.” Well, maybe not the second one. Thirdly, Dr Bastard writes that “...had been strictly gluten free at the time of endoscopy on 17th September 2012 which showed some changes of coeliac disease. Never mind the questionable use of “of” there, what does he mean by “some changes”? It's pretty vague for someone who specialises in this field, to say the least. Fourthly, “...we should diagnose definite coeliac disease in his case.” Well that's a suspiciously massive change to what he told me, which was a half-hearted “Pffftttt... Maybe you have it? Heads or tails?” He also spelt dietitian wrong in the letter, but that's fine because it's not like he works very close with them a lot. And finally, at the bottom of the letter he says that he has arranged an appointment with a dietitian for me, which is nice to know. What is slightly less nice is that Doctor Bastard has neglected to furnish me with salient information, such as WHEN THE BLOODY APPOINTMENT IS.



Today's Tune 

In Which I- Shit!!! Did you see that?!? He must have a foot like a traction engine!

Yesterday, I lied. Well, that's a lie. I wrote something I believed to be the case, but it has turned out to be untrue- namely, that I was today to write about co-inkydinks and submarines. However, I have to react to what I saw yesterday. England lost four goals to two against Sweden. Never mind that England lost, never mind that the 50,000 crowd were about as noisy as the cast of The Only Way is Essex explaining Cartesian Dualism whilst in a vacuum. The important thing is that Sweden's Zlatan Ibrahimovic scored a goal of such skill as to instantly be hailed as one of the best goals ever. It was tenacious, it was sublime, it was perfect technique, it was super sexy is what I'm trying to say. Joe Hart tried to clear the ball with his head as he was outside the 18 yard box and he could only head it vertically. Ibrahimovic, who had already scored a hat-trick in this, the national stadium's opening game thought “D'you know what? I know I'm 30 yards out and facing away from goal, but I'm going to score from here with one touch of the ball because I want to be remembered as scoring one of the best goals of all time.” And it was. 

I have been watching football since I can remember, and I have seen many a great goal from before then. Zlatan scoring like this was the first time I'd seen anything like this- for one thing, his foot's 8 feet off the ground when he kicks it. I love how I can still see things that are new in the most popular sport of all time. When the ball went in, I made some sort of noise that I think I will not be able to replicate. I then stood up and started to applaud at the television screen. This isn't a particularly good article, but I had to just say how excellent that goal was. I suspect it's the best goal I've ever seen live. I don't think I may ever see a better one, but I live in hope. 

Today's Tune 

In Which I Quote a Footballing Statistic

"Scotland's worst ever ranking came in March 2005 when they were in 88th position, but their latest drop puts them below Gabon (52nd), Cape Verde Islands (63rd) and Uzbekistan (69th)." This is a monumental achievement, and as such should be applauded by one and all.

Tomorrow I write about coincidences and submarines.


Today's Tune