How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [96]
What the doctor was doing in between was going to a desk and sitting down. I watched him do it. He would go into a cubicle, be rude, cause the patient a bit of pain and then sit down again on the hospital’s only chair.
Seven hours after the accident, in a country widely touted to be the safest and best in the world, he applied sixteen stitches that couldn’t have been less neat if he’d done them on a battlefield, with twigs. And then the anaesthetist arrived to wake the boy up. In French. This didn’t work, so she went away to sit on the doctor’s chair because he was in another cubicle bring rude and causing pain to someone else.
Now, I appreciate that any doctor who ends up working the night shift at a provincial hospital in Nowheresville is unlikely to be at the top of his game, and you can’t judge a country’s healthcare on his piss-poor performance. And nor should all of Canada be judged on Quebec, which is full of idealistic, language-Nazi lunatics. But I can say this. If private treatment had been allowed, my friend would have paid for it. He would have received better service and, in doing so, allowed Dr Useless to get to the woman with no face or ecstasy boy more quickly. Though I suspect he would have used our absence to spend more time sitting down.
The other thing I can say is that Britain’s National Health Service is a monster that we can barely afford. But in all the times I’ve ever used the big, flawed giant, no one has ever pretended to be French, no one has spent more time swiping my credit card than ordering painkillers and there are many chairs.
Sunday 30 August 2009
It’s just not fair – donkeys get all the breaks
Like most people, I can wire a plug and change a wheel. These are simple things. But I cannot reassemble the coffee machine that I took to pieces this morning, and I cannot drill a hole in a wall. Anything even remotely complicated and I’m stumped, which is why, when I came home yesterday to find one of my donkeys in the middle of the road, I knew the day would not end well.
Have you ever tried to move a donkey when it wants to remain stationary? It’d be easier to move France. So what do you do? If you break off from traffic control to fetch an enticing apple from the kitchen, you know that when you get back to the scene, Uma – for that is her name – will have entered a passing car via its windscreen. And quite apart from the sadness that such an accident would cause me and the relatives of the person in the car – whose death will have been neither comfortable nor dignified – there would be many forms to complete and many stern words from a policeman.
I was weighing all this up when the arrival of a noisy motorcycle galvanized Uma into action. Sadly, the action in question was a great deal of Elvis impersonations with the top lip and an industrial bout of heehawing. Eventually, other motorists arrived on the scene and, this being the countryside, where people have little else to do, everyone got out of their cars to help. When we had a thousand or so, we were able to push the poor animal, legs locked, back into the paddock from which she had escaped.
And then, two hours later, the police called round to say that she, along with her mate Eddie, was out again. This time, on what is called an A road but is actually a motorcycle racetrack. With the help of most of the population of southern England, and tactical air support, they were heaved back into the field, and this time I set about finding the route they were using to get out. And it was the damnedest thing. I looked for holes in the fence. I looked under their stove. I looked under their vaulting horse. I even checked their beds for evidence of missing planks. But there was nothing, and so I concluded that they were getting airborne somehow. Maybe they’d built a glider.
This is the other part of my condition. Like many men, I can never find anything that I’m looking for, even when I’m actually looking at it. In a fridge, I think milk is actually invisible