Coughing to victory!

I do not suspect vicious intent on the part of our doctors in our local surgery. They have set up shop in a pair of semi detached houses and the waiting room on the ground floor is a strange shape meandering past the receptionist’s window and working its way to the back of the houses and into the next one. This means that leg room is at a premium. There are very few spaces that a patient waiting can actually stretch his or her legs. Now, given the waiting time that ensues before a patient is seen there must be a need to stretch and find something to do.

As is usual in doctors’ waiting rooms, dentists’ waiting rooms and hospital waiting rooms, there are the ageless magazines that you find nowhere else displaying a studied tattiness that you only see on period sets on television drama series! They are also the sort of magazines that no one anyone knows ever buys. Where do they find them? These grubby pages clinging forlornly to rusting staples are reminders of the interests of a class far removed from that enjoyed by the majority of inhabitants in Rumney!

So with nothing to read and no space to spread out the only thing that you are left with is to have recourse to conversation; but the layout is not conducive to easy linguistic interchange and so the usual mode of talk is actually whispers, giving the atmosphere in the waiting room more of a church like mood.

It is always a relief when your name is called, though you have to run the gauntlet of the people left waiting as they assess the appropriateness of the name called out to the person walking towards one of the consulting rooms.

Luckily, given my chesty cough, there was no problem about being prescribed antibiotics so I am now taking nine tablets a day. That it should come to this!

On a more positive note: ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ was handed back to the library this morning and by the early evening the very excellent Rumney Library had managed to get me a copy of ‘Barnaby Rudge.’ Superb service! Though I was hoping for a little respite before I had to plunge into another 800 page novel, I am eager to re-read (yes, re-read, I read it first on my handheld!) this relatively unpopular novel by Dickens.

Coughing should be recognised as an art form, or possibly a sport (and thinking of London 2012) surely, an Olympic sport, at that. I say this in all humility because I could now be a major competitor with a realistic chance for the Gold. Again, being realistic, we stand a very good chance of being, with Canada, one of only two countries to host the Olympic Games without actually winning a single gold medal. Or indeed, if you scratch gently at our raw neuroses, any medals at all. All of our metal ware is going to be made cheaply in China, flown over to London, only to be re-exported to China at the end of the Games. Let’s hope that the National Mint in Llantrisant has won the contract to produce the medals for the Chinese Olympics, ‘cos that’s the only way that we are going to see any medals in Wales.

But perhaps I am being too pessimistic. Perhaps the awarding of the Games to London in 2012 was not, as I now suspect, a dastardly plot by the French, in a typically Gallic game of triple double-dealing, to humiliate us by not only forcing us to host the most expensive two weeks in the world in the 80% of a lustrum from 2008 to 2012, [Note: this is a tediously pretentious way of saying four years; a lustrum being an obscure word for five years, therefore 80% of it being four years. Ed.] But also an empty achievement which will trumpet our lack of sporting talent to the world. Damned cunning those Froggies! [Remember Jade! Ed.]

Enough of this self defeating pessimism: Vivat! Britannia! What if Spain won 13 (Dear God!) Gold medals when they hosted the Olympic Games: we can do that. Can’t we?

I’m too ill, practising my chest rattling cough, to be any more positive.

I’m going to bed!