Hair like ice cream. Ice cream like hair

Whoop whoop its the sound of the police

About ten days and quite a lot of penicillin later I was coughing like a miner (not a minor) so I decided to go back to the doctors. 

The doctor I had seen previously was all booked up so I went to see my least favourite doctor. She is my least favourite because 

a. she always looks very serious 

b. she nods very seriously whilst I talk

and 

c. she is very serious.  

She has a long face and quite a severe hair cut, I imagine she is married to either a vet or a vicar and I think she spends much of her time day dreaming about owning a cheese shop or having an affair with the owner of a cheese shop.

I explained about the noise and the coughing. She nodded seriously. She had a listen, she said the noise was but a whisper and that a piece of asthmatic equipment that can act like a nebuliser, some steroids and a rest should do the trick.

Then she paused.

'Now' she said seriously 'I'm not by any means suggesting you have this...'

'Oh god, I'm dying' I thought

'...but' she continued with severity 'there's this website.'

'I have a website in my lungs?' I wondered silently.

'...compiled by a GP. This website is dedicated entirely to adult whooping cough'

I don't know why it isn't spelt hooping cough, whooping cough sounds like an illness you should only have during significant periods of celebration.

'Now, you can go on the site and listen to recordings of coughing, and if your cough sounds like the cough on the website, you probably have whooping cough' She said matter-of-factly. 

'So, here I am in a doctors surgery and you are sitting near me and I keep on coughing, but you are unwilling to tell me if I have whooping cough but rather are asking me to go and listen to recordings of coughs on the internet and diagnose myself....isn't that your job?'

Of course I didn't say that. What I did say was;

'What if I have it?'

'Oh' she said seriously 'there's no cure, but its nice to know!'

'Is it?'

I left and went home to study www.whoopingcough.net

I shouldn't have been so scornful, its probably the best website ever! It's run by a doctor who bares more than a passing resemblance to Harold Shipman. He says;

"My mission is to make health professionals aware that whooping cough is much more common than they realise, that it now affects ALL AGES....This site gives relief to those who have it but cannot get anyone to believe them... "

God bless him!

Apparently...

"Attempts to get benefit from cough suppressants or antibiotics are generally futile"

and most damningly...

"Whooping cough is estimated to be 100 times more common than official statistics show!"

In your face statistics!

If you think you or someone you know has whooping cough, please click here

...I don't

What ails me

I started finding it difficult to breathe. 

Breathing became something I thought about all the time occasionally having to remind myself to inhale.  

This is a strange sensation akin to when some says "think about blinking!" Suddenly this is all you can think about and you start blinking repeatedly like someone who has just been woken up by having a bright light shone in their face.

The lack of breathing had been causing me to have nightmares about asphyxiation and occasionally I'd feel faint, so I thought, I'll go to the doctors, that's what I'll do. So I did.

I told the doctor what was happening, he stethoscoped me and said with some ambiguity, "You have  a noise on your lung" he did not extrapolate as to what kind of noise, was it a hiss or a rattle or a disconcerting whistle? We shall never know for he did not say. "This indicates you have a lung infection."

I looked at him blankly as he gave me a prescription for penicillin. 

"Thank you" I said not thinking to ask any questions. "I've been feeling pretty..."

"...Crappy" he interrupted.

"Yes" I said.

"Right, well thanks for coming in and sorry you're feeling so shit!"

"Erm..thanks" He nodded and smiled and showed me the door.

Sort of like Romeo

I was sitting on the 236 bus when my eye was drawn to an old man standing on the third floor balcony of a tower block. The man was chatting to his son, enjoying a can of special brew wearing nothing but his underpants. The son was fully clothed in a navy track suit and there they stood leaning over the railings passing the time of day, watching the world go by, drinking beer in various states of dress and undress. 

I stared at them quite rudely believing myself to be invisible behind the obviously transparent bus window- I didn't realise they were watching me watching them- perhaps that's the definition of snobbery. 

The old man with his sinuous limbs and lank yellow hair that stuck to his fore head and cheeks like a veil  reminded me of Iggy Pop. The son had just the same face as the father; both wore an expression of acceptance mixed with disillusion.

After a few seconds Iggy Pop raised his can in the air, nodded and I think...although it was quite far away, winked suggestively at me. 

Another eligible suitor for my collection; and they say its hard to meet men in London!

Songs about Dogs

http://open.spotify.com/user/sarahross25/playlist/0WovEZdkO93XAlMyDh4HNr

I screamed and my friend  lifted her legs in the air and squeeked.

"Excuse me" I said to the barmaid. "There's a massive mouse in the fireplace" Prompting me to wonder if 'massive mouse' was an oxymoron.

"I know" she said casually "a man came to kill him."

I felt sad.

Hang on a minute

Sometime ago I was waiting for a friend outside the Tate Modern.

It was a Saturday and there were people wandering around pretending to know where they were going but not really having a clue. (I recognise the signs as I do this all the time, techniques include; looking at one's watch, looking at one's phone, looking at other people in the hope that they are just as confused as you.)

Two men walked around the corner. They stopped and looked up at the imposing brick work, the straight lines, the big signs. One of them took out his guide book, searched for the relevant page and on finding it he slowly rotated the book-as if turning it upside down might make sense of the world.

They looked at each other in confused silence and then the man with the guidebook said in surprise...

"Hang on a minute" He exclaimed in a shrill American accent "This isn't Shakespeare's Globe!"