My neurologist rang yesterday.
She filled me in on the latest news on my brain haemorrhage. God you guys must be so fed up with this!
Well, she said that the climical meeting has been held – a kind of medical summit with me as the centre of attention – actually the sad part of me really loves that.
So doctors with different disciplines sat around talking about me, looking at all those scan pictures and reports. Great, so they would definitely recognise me if I saw them at the supermarket checkout.
Well, she said, we are uneasy about you.
We just can’t tie down why you had that haemorrhage, the brain seizures or why you suffered so much physical damage.
We don’t know why you are at risk of these things, in fact you are the opposite of the kind of person who we would expect to be at risk.
So we are upping the doseage on your anti-seizure drugs, you know the ones that make your tremble and shake, and we want you to come into hospital next week.
Heigh-ho!
They are not the only people who are uneasy.
We have striking workers in Britain again, they are over there in France too and they might even get them in China this year, we are told.
It is this damnable credit crunch. Things just aren’t as we want them.
Those doctors want to find the reasons for my illness and just put it right and get on with the next job.
It is true with the world economy too – but those experts at the International Monetary Fund have made things even worse here in Britain by saying that they think that we are going to have the worst of the recession.
Well thanks, guys.
Well, I suppose if we had a clinical meeting about the state of the UK, we might find the reasons for this illness more easily than the neurologists at my hospital.
We used to make things….big, complicated pieces of engineering with pistons and pumps, giant steel machines which revolutionised international industry. We were world leaders and we were really really good at it.
These days our clever people, the ones who have been making our economy tick, they have a different game.
They take people’s money, put it somewhere else and then get even more money back. They take quite a lot for themselves, just like the Victorian engineers, but when things go wrong, when they find they were putting money in the wrong places, they don’t look quite so clever.
That is what has happened here and sadly the rest of the country can’t go back to those big machines or even those wonderful productive farms.
No, these days, most other jobs in this country are service industries which look after all those money makers.
Now they aren’t so busy popping into our coffee shops, clothes stores or computer technology on-line mail order places.
No, we are sick and we have started to complain.
It won’t do any good, of course, any more than my complaints about being ill and having to go to hospital.
Well, today, I am going to protest – I am not going to be that careful, inspite of all the advice, I am going to my Kung fu club for a weekend class in martial arts patterns.
In my own way, I will be punching the hell out of all those things that go wrong.