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Monday, May 07, 2012

Blood and everything


You really know where you place in the pecking order of health is when you go to the free-for-all which is our bloodletting session at the local health centre.

In theory everyone has a printed-paper which details exactly how much and for what the blood is going to be drawn but as I was summoned by mobile phone message for this session I was paperless.

By the time I had worked out that I should probably go to the reception desk and get some sort of official permission to join in the fun they had called out the names and a rough order of people had been set.  The pathetic bleats of my name were greeted with the stern instruction that I came under the heading of “anyone else” and I should go to the back of the queue.

Given the collection of shuffling misfits who probably regarded this session as a major social event, I imagine that the nurse was used to the hard of hearing and the almost dead not quite getting it together well enough to leap to attention at the mention of their name and snap smartly into line.  If most of the aged persons waiting to give the red stuff had even made a partial attempt to get into place in time to the hastily read list of order of seeing, I suspect that only thing about them that would have snapped would have been their bones.

Having resigned myself to an almost last position I promptly sat down and took out my trust phone and continued reading the sci-fi novel which is almost completely incomprehensible but addictive at the same time.

A quick extraction and I was on my way – but on the wrong motorway and was duly held up in St Boi but not enough to miss anything more than part of the first lesson.  Ah well, better than nothing.

The kids have started counting down to the end of term.  We teachers have been doing this for some time, but been too appalled at the number of days left to admit it!

In the second half of this week we start yet another season of examinations; if they weren’t so revolting to set and mark the frequency of these pointless impositions would be amusing.  But they are and it isn’t.

Tomorrow six periods.  Sigh.

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