Activity weekend

A and I spent a good portion of the bank holiday weekend camping with R&N, M&B and RP. I also entered a mountain bike race.

25K across the Brecon Beacons with 1000 other cyclists. I was loving it initially riding past people on much swankier bikes than mine climbing up some severe hills. I was riding with B and I kept stopping to wait for her to catch up. Unfortunately at the top of a really massive hill I stopped and waited.......and waited.........no sign of her. In fact, unbeknowst to me, she had kept going past me and I had missed her. I waited for at least ten minutes and thought she must have broken down. The chain had already come off her bike earlier. So I cycled back down the hill. I received a large number of comments along the lines of "wrong way mate" and "er it's that way I think". I got to the bottom where I had last seen her and she wasn't there. I thought she must have dropped out and gone back to base. So I turned round and started climbing the massive hill again but my legs were cold and I was exhausted I tried and tried to keep going but in the end I had to get off and push and I vomited. Just after that point is when the official photographer appears and starts snapping away. I'm doing my best to smile and not to take it seriously but after 30 seconds of click click click as I came towards him I was sorely tempted to perform an improvised colonoscopy with his equipment.

Eventually I got back to the top of the hill and continued up a track which had turned into a quagmire. I was slipping and sliding all over the place and my rear wheel was spinning and dropping into a different rut from the one my front wheel was in. Total nightmare. Needless to say I fell off. I was going downhill quite quickly and my brakes weren't working. My bike stopped when it went into a deep rut and I didn't. I have a cracking bruise on my shin. I lay on the sodden ground rolling around in agony and the last few competitors who were still behind me (a family with three small children) all stopped to see if I was ok. I was cold, embarrassed and still nauseous, I really felt like quitting but there was nowhere to quit. So I soldiered on and again was making progress and was quite happy. I sipped from my borrowed camel-back and chewed an energy bar.

I got to a rest station and felt ok so kept going however I went the wrong way and ended up on the 50k course. I must have continued along it for about a kilometer. A nice lady noticed that I didn't look like a 50k rider and sent me on an escape run down to the finish. My cycle computer said I had done 24 miles which converts to 38K. When I got back to the finish I found the truth about B and the guy on the PA system had a good laugh at my bike which still had its luggage rack on from my daily commutes. But it was actually in spite of everything good fun and I will do it again.

A photo I obtained from the official website shows me seconds before I stacked it at great speed when I went down a short section of downhill. The observant amongst you will note the mud caked onto my brakes. I discovered that this stops them working very effectively. When they are all caked up like that, they slow you down all the time, except for when you want them to. That is why, apparently, good mountain bikes have disc brakes.

Luckily for me the post vomit pictures have not made it onto the website.

A was a bit annoyed that she hadn't been entered into the race. I will make sure she is next time. However I'm pretty sure she isn't enough of a sadomasachist to enjoy it but we will see.

After the race was over we barbequed and the next day we set off to visit my Mum and Dad. It was good to get some home comforts to ease my aches and pains.

Back to earth with a bump

After all the joy and excitement of the weekend its tough to face reality again. Did another locum at K last night and yet again knife did not touch skin. Although I did get to step in and save the day when a couple of A+E Drs couldn't stop the bleeding from this chaps scalp laceration. I came in, was very reassuring and once I stopped it with a couple of big bites with a heavy suture, giving the A+E Drs a bit of a tutorial, I left feeling smug once more about knowing what I'm doing. Back at college however, with data to analyse and a distant yet terrible deadline looming I feel like a lost little boy.

On top of that I have a dental appointment and I am expecting them to extract my 3rd molar which has been damaged probably beyond repair by my wisdom tooth.

On the bright side the cat locator radio tracking collars have arrived which means when I get home I can check out their capabilities, fit them and then begin to allow the cats out into the garden. I won't miss the litter tray or being forced to keep all the windows in the flat closed. Also it breaks my heart when they sit there miowing at the window.

Also tonight there are hastily arranged celebration drinks in our local. We will have more celebrations which are better organized but this one is the first.

Shrieks of laughter

Went to see a play called Shrieks of Laughter last night with A. It was written by N's brother Moses Raine and was in the Soho Theatre on Dean Street. It was very good actualy. A mixture of dark disturbing stuff and some very funny lines from interesting characters. Basically there is this young lad who is having hypnotherapy from a very strange therapist who is very agressive and religious. The scene at the beginning where this PSYCHOtherapist (in the Hitchcock sence of the psycho) is hypnotising the guy makes you really uncomfortable. Hestarts of basicalyt telling the patient he can do this the easy way or the hard way. Then he is commanding the patient to close his eyes telling him to go down into an abyss of a hundred year sleep and that Jesus will forgive all his sins. Its like he's being hypnotised into a cult and as he talks through the hypnotic induction you are scarred he might get you too. Freaky.

Next there are scenes where members of his family are talking about him sometimes conversing with eachother sometimes short monologues. The mother is a posh hippy and the father is a comedy bad tempered brigadeer type with a yacht (says it all). As the play procedes you discover why the poor chap needs therapy but I won't spoil the plot. The scenes involving the father blarting out various stereotypical right wing dad statements are very funny. The use of language is very clever and the set design and especially the sound effects were excellent and fitted the play really well. It would be a good idea to see it twice I think. Like the movies 'Fight Club' or 'The Usual Suspects' you could get lost really easily if your concentration dipped. Might go and see it again and fill in the gaps a bit.

As to which of the two Raine plays I preferred. That's a tough one. They are very different I thought but A did point out that there are some big similarities too. Both deal with altered levels of conciousness and there is the death of a parent in both and a parent with a large slightly overbearing personality in both. The style is very different. M's play had a much better set, sound and lighting but that was the theatre not the play. Both write dialogue really well in a way that people actually speak. I don't want to cop out and declare a tie so I will go for N's as I found it easier to follow and enjoyed the male characters fighting back (for once).

Massive News

Well I've been planning to do this for a few weeks and have been unable to mention it on here because it had to be kept secret until the right day. Anyway I proposed to my girlfriend A and she accepted. I popped the question between starter and main course in Mr Underhill's in Ludlow. Down on one knee and whipped out the ring I bought the previous week. I was nervous and to be honest my memory of the event is hazy already but A said of course and I asked her again and she said of course again and then I can't remember what I said. But the end result is I am over the moon and A is going to be my wife.

This weekend we had planned a culinary tour of Ludlow and I had booked into all three of the Michelin star places. It was ostensibly to celebrate the first anniversary of our meeting. We were camping because we couldn't afford a hotel and all the restaurants and our priorities lie firmly with the food.

We set up camp on Friday afternoon in the rain and the rain didn't stop until we had packed all our sodden gear into the car to come home. In spite of the weather the weekend was a fantastic success not only because A and I are now engaged but also because we had such an amazing time in the restaurants and looking round the castle.















View of Ludlow from half way down the hill from the campsite in a brief interlude from the rain

More about the food later. Tonight we're going to see N's brother's play.

Rabbit

I went to see a play last night with A that was written and directed by a friend of mine Nina. It was a really great thought provoking play. It was only the second night and you could just catch the actors remembering their lines but overall they did a really good job. The play was about a girl whose father, whom she idolises, is dying of a brain cancer. He is dying in such a way that he is gradually losing mental capacity but holds onto enough to stubbornly refuse surgery which he believes will be ultimately pointless. The girl, Bella, wants her Dad to have the surgery but her argument is based wholly on sentiment. Her father points out the doctors are talking about a short addition to his life expectancy at a cost in suffering he is not prepared to pay. She tries to persuade him using all manner of tactics but to no avail and as his function declines she cannot bear to be around him.

This whole plot line is mixed, by a series of cut scenes/flashbacks, into another. The second stem to the story is the interaction between Bella and the guests at her 29th birthday party. This is set in a contemporary bar. The guests arrive gradually as the first act progresses. There are two old flames and two female mates. Of the two guys one was a significant ex who is a noisy barrister wanna-be writer and the other is a quiet smart city worker who turns out to be the man on the side that destroyed the barristers relationship with Bella. The girls are a pretty young junior doctor with a heart and a somewhat shameless scratch card addicted provocative sexual predatress writer. The characters are great with real depth and their attitudes lined up perfect for a good fight. The dialogue was fantastic with loads of venom and swearing. I loved the description of envy being like farts. “Everybody has it but you don’t let it out in public because it makes you smell bad and everyone moves away from you”. The rows were around the battle of the sexes who has it tougher men or women the usual but really good well argued stuff. Certainly the quality of the argument was far too good for the quantity of wine consumed. There was one cool part where Richard the barrister/writer was arguing that women treat men as sexual objects rather than men objectifying women. He bases this on the fact that women are prepared to share intimate details of their sexual conquests whereas men do not. The quiet bloke Tom chips in with a great point arguing that men want to own those details. That they brag with vague details but they don’t want to share details because they don’t want to share their women. Another cool bit was when the doctor explained how memory works. She described it as a room full of tuning forks so that when one rings it sets of the others with the same resonant frequency off and that’s how one memory causes others to pop into consciousness.

I met Nina when she was doing research at my hospital for another play about junior doctors. She is really serious about researching her topic and this play also contained loads of accurate medical knowledge.

Nina messes with your head by using lines of dialogue again in different contexts. This seems to happen when she wants to highlight contradictions in the character’s arguments. I can’t remember any examples but it’s really sneaky and unnerving. She also gave us no outcome to the who would end up with who question. But I guess you’re always supposed to leave the audience wanting more. Great play. I’m pretty sure A agrees but she is writing her own review on her blog.

A and I are going to see Nina’s brother’s play on Monday so there will be a real battle of the sexes. Which Raine can write the better play? My money’s on Nina.

Mr Ethical missed a trick

Newsnight’s ‘Mr Ethical’ missed a trick last night. To set the scene a journalist has gone ethical and filmed his experiences with the problems that this brings up in his day to day life with his wife and two young kids. By ethical he means he has made changes to his life wherever possible to minimise his negative impact on the planet and society. So he only buys fair trade produce when it is available, he has insulated his house, he is actively recycling, he is conserving electricity water etc you get the idea. Last night the article covered him getting rid of his car and making do with public transport. There were clips of him struggling back with shopping from the supermarket and another of his wife being annoyed when she couldn’t nip out and get polenta or whatever middle class need they had I forget. There was a clip where his wife made him admit that he missed the power he felt being behind the wheel of a car (even though it was a really dull family car he got rid of). All quite amusing. They covered the alternatives like strictly PT only, car sharing, electric and hybrid cars, and he had a brief piece on a chap who was running a diesel landrover on unprocessed vegetable oil. There was an expert who pointed out that the hybrid and electic cars still generated CO2 but that the emissions were better for the urban environment and another guy who pointed out that a large portion of a car’s carbon footprint was in its initial production. He didn’t take a proper look at biodiesel however which is not the same as unprocessed veg oil. Unprocessed veg oil becomes wax at 10 degrees Celsius which makes it usless in the winter unless you invest in a heated fuel tank. Biodiesel is basically the same as regular diesel and can be used in current unconverted diesel engines. Because producing biomatter absourbs CO2 from the atmosphere when you burn biodiesel the net amount of CO2 released is zero. When you consider that an average car produces its own weight in CO2 every 6000 miles and you look at the number of cars on the road. The benefit of going to biodiesel is obvious.

Paxman came up with a cracking fact in the discussion at the end of the report however. In the next 50 days the growth in China’s economy will account for an additional output of CO2 greater than the total output for all transport in the uk last year. Basically we’re all doomed.

For those of you who like to point out that temperature has varied by dramatic amounts without man’s interference I include the hockey stick. Note the 3 or 4 mini ice ages. Frost fares on the thames and bitter cold winters attributed to a massive volcanic eruptions. Tiny tiny effect compared to the industrial revolution and the advent of the internal combustion engine.
Millennial Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature reconstruction (blue – tree rings, corals, ice cores, historical records) and instrumental data (red) from AD 1000 to 1999. A smoother version (black), and two standard error limits (grey) are shown. Source: IPCC Third Assessment Report

Drink more

What a sanctimonious load of twaddle that last entry was. Sorry about that. I still say that getting totally wasted is bad though. Possibly the whole point of your twenties is to learn that. But a bit of social lubrication is a healthy thing.

I had a fantastic cookery demonstration at Almeida restaurant in Islington. It was a Christmas present from A and it has taken us until now to get it organised. I was expecting Almeida to be a little bistro place and when I walked in to this massive Conran styled place I was gobsmacked. The head chef Ian Wood was a really nice chap, nothing like the bully like image you have come to expect from watching Ramsey. When A more or less told him off for not tasting the food often enough he handled it better than I do when she makes helpful suggestions to me when I'm cooking. There were five people at the demonstration including us. We sat on stools at the 'service' where the waiters pick up the plates to take out and stick the orders up on the rail thing. The kitchen was quiet but some things were being prepared by the teenaged army of kitchen hands. He stood in the kitchen cooking at the stove nearest the service and put things down on it to taste and look at. He took us through a four course dinner from the Provence region showing loads of cool little tips on the way. For example how to cook onions down to a deep brown colour without burning them. How too cook button onions so they end up soft and yet not too brown on the outside. How to get a scallop to go golden brown at the edge without overcooking it. How that when something looks like it was all cooked together it need not be and in fact that it can be better to cook components separately and combine then at the end. How to and how not to cook a creme brulee.

That was all excellent but the best was yet to come. We then got to eat the same menu and it was heavenly. We had an onion, olive and anchovy tart called a salineirre (no idea how to spell that but tasted so lovely with the sweet onion and and savory anchovies) then we had scallops on a tomato and basil fondue (amazing scallops really fresh and just cooked so still piping hot, sauce was good and uncomplicated). Next came the Daube (Beef cheek stew essentially, it was three decent chunks of really tender beef with a garnish of button onions button mushrooms and pancetta lardons, served with mash this was gorgeous and my favorite of the evening) . The creme brulee was very good. I wasn't expecting anything so organised and professional and I wasn't expecting such an amazing meal. But the biggest surprise was the amazing amount of attention we got from the sommelier and the vast quantity of incredible wine he practically threw down our necks. There was a pastice apperatif and different wine with each course and he wasn't holding back. It was all like heaven in a glass and it enhanced the food and the conversation and the evening as a whole.

Mainly for that reason I won't be quitting drinking any time soon. Cheers!

Drink less

Metal note to self……………..Drink less! How many times have we said it? “Never again”. If you’re anything like me the answer is many many times. In fact the number isn’t the same as the number of hangovers I’ve had. It’s closer to the number of times I can remember stupid things I have done and said whilst pissed.

My brother P was at Mum and Dad’s visiting from Hong Kong. We have always had a relationship where we get on really well but we have a capacity to really enrage each other. I’ve been thinking back and it’s always when we’re pissed. P it seems has developed an interest in alternative medicine. He’s not a whacko but he’s open minded. I’m probably not very open minded about it if I’m honest and when I’m pissed I’m always honest. For honest read indelicate and stupid. When I encounter people with beliefs contrary to my own I try to handle it delicately. Alcohol seems to dissolve this ability. It also dissolves Pete’s ability to tolerate me winding him up. So once again our infrequent meeting was to some extent spoilt by a row which left us both angry. Just like last time it was on the last evening and just like last time we were drunk or at least I was. Mum was there and put a stop to it but in the past things have got ugly on one occasion about 7 years ago I ended up knocked out on the floor in a puddle of blood. My little brother isn’t so little any more. On this occasion next day nothing more was said on the subject and we had a great laugh showing A the ‘Eye Toys’ game on the PS2. The fact remains we keep doing this. I can’t stop myself from having a dig. At least I can’t when I’ve had a drink. It makes me think if I am to have a good relationship with P I have to cut out the booze when I’m around him.

On two recent occasions I have seen two of my friends in complete states and rather than just think it was hilarious as I might normally it struck me that it is getting less funny. It’s almost sad. I think that to function in this society without alcohol is harder than functioning without eating meat. No one will let it lie. You get pestered and pestered until you relent.
It is my opinion that we all know two contradictory things to be absolutely true about alcohol;.

1. Without alcohol we can’t loosen up, dance, talk with wit and entertain the crowd.
2. When someone drinks they become less funny less able to dance and a complete bore.

Holding two contradictory beliefs leads to a psychological phenomenon called cognitive dissonance. Basically this is where you hold contradictory beliefs which causes psychological strain and your brain is forced to generate elaborate strategies to avoid confronting the contradiction, the dissonance. One such strategy which allows you to believe both things about alcohol is to say that you know when to stop, you can handle your drink, you are different, special. To believe that there is an optimum level of intoxication which walks the tight rope between raconteur and oaff and you’ve got it cracked, it’s the others that can’t pull it off. In fact if we’re honest that is utter bollocks. What is actually true is that we need everyone else to get a little bit more pissed than us. We basically want to get pissed because it is enjoyable it is a drug induced loss of control which is a thrill but we don’t want anyone to see us as we know we really are when drunk. That is why a teetotaller is as welcome at a dinner party as a sneezing Vietnamese chicken. As a host I’d rather cater for an ultra vegan than for someone who doesn’t drink. This is because a sober member of the party will see that the emperor really is naked and we really are just pissed boring idiots arguing about completely meaningless nonsense. They are like a CCTV camera or a magic mirror. We can see the disapproval in their eyes even through our alcoholic fog even if they are trying their best not to let it show. We can remember the times we’ve watched boozed up toffs thinking they’re comedians. They will force us to admit that we don’t know when to stop. They will make us realize that one of the truths about alcohol will have to go, will have to be erased because they can’t both be right. Alcohol is a recreational drug if recreational drugs are a bad idea then they are a bad idea without exception.
We’ve all seen the extreme cases of alcohol misuse and that’s obviously bad but how many little injuries to your relationships, your career, has it caused?
I no longer use any illicit substances. Now I’m going to drink less. I mean it this time. Although I doubt I can stop altogether.

What do you have to do round here to get some cutting?

I just did a semi mega dog shift at K. Three nightshifts on the trot. I was originally going to do five but the half wit who books locums after agreeing I'd do five is pretending that I had contacted her asking not to do the weekend. I didn't but in the end I'm glad because I am already a bit knackered and A has pointed out to me that apart from actual holidays I have worked at least one day of every weekend for the last six.

I get very well paid and allowed to act up as a registrar when I work at K. This means swanning around looking important and reviewing other junior doctors diagnosis and management plans. I also get to save the day when they can't do a procedure or miss something. It feels fantastic its almost like being a consultant. The best thing about it is that you finally get some action in theatre. That is you usually do but not this time. Three days not so much a boil to lance. I was hoping at least for a couple of appendix but nothing. I managed to watch all three matrix movies with the news uninterrupted because it was so quiet. I shouldn't complain but I haven't done an operation for a couple of months now and I'm getting withdrawal symptoms. Whilst sleeping on the couch in the doctor's mess last night I dreamed the whole sequence from skin to skin of a defunctioning loop colostomy. Its so not a healthy dream to be having. I don't want to dream about large bowl, stoma bags and shit.

I bet the next two shifts I would have been doing are chock full of nice straight forward ops that the other locum is going to get to do and he won't appreciate them at all!