Eye, Nose and Throat

After sitting in a waiting room for an hour, with six elderly ladies and a copy of Saga magazine for company, the test was a five minute affair. An awkward and painful squirt of liquid into each eye, some staring into a bright light, and the news that there's no traces of glaucoma - but that I should have a checkup in six months.

Saga is a glossy magazine aimed at people who are wealthy and white, middle aged, middle class, middle england, married and moderate. It's "conservative with a small C", which is to say "Banal with a small B". It's Watchtower without the imminent apocalypse, or Reader's Digest without the glurge.

However, thanks to it, I now know that George Melly keeps papillions - very much like mine. The bits about him being a drugged up hellraiser, bisexual homewrecker, wearer of really bad suits and a great jazzman were omitted.

On the other hand, given the choice between reading that stuff and being unable to see the page at all, I think I'll continue reading it. And I'll put up with the streaming nose the eyedrops gave me

On the way home, I bought myself a second hand book:

Voice Training in Speech and Song
An Account of the structures and Use
of the Vocal Organs, and the Means
of Securing Distinct Articulation
By H H Hulbert MA Oxon MRCS LCRP
Published 1908

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Spent the night in a pub full of drugged out hippies aged 18 to 58. From student stoners to those who never stopped being student stoners in their hearts. My kind of people.

Simon M thinks my family is strange and distrubing because I and my parents have never hugged or said we loved each other. I think he's been watching too many schmaltzy american sitcoms where that kind of schlock actually happens. "Gee, I love ya dad."