…as my Professor not infrequently exclaimed.

I have been shortlisted for the job.

The job is a part-clinical and part navel-gazing-academic post, designed to get people with previous research experience a bit of postdoctoral time. The longterm aim is to end up with a part-academic career, e.g. Senior Lecturer. It’s what I’ve wanted since I came back from Over There. Gosh, but it’s scary, though. I have to do a three-slide, five-minute presentation on “How I would develop my research over the next two years at University of Astro City.”

Erm, I would blog more? Spend more time on the Hindernet? Post some photos? It would be just like old times!

I need to go to bed now, so I can lie awake and fret at the ceiling.

See those bloody trousers! Well, I know you don’t, bezause I’m anonymoose and all that, but pls indulge me. I was out for a bit of Holy yesterday morning, skipping up the car park afterwards and caught Right Toe in Flapping Left Trouser Leg. I sprawled full-length up the gravelly car park.

Ouch!

I thought I’d broken my wrist, I really did.

Ouch!!

Bats and Sister and the Mammy horsed me into the car and I realised I was absolutely fine, apart from a scraped knee, a nastily-jarred shoulder and two slightly gravelly palms. I had to pick out the gravel at home.

Double ouch!

I think the trousers are out to get me…

(For those with an interest, The Mammy has long referred to me as “A Footless Crayter.”)

Here’s a question for all the Dear Readers: what would you do?
I’m on call, and sneaked out for lunch between hospitals. In the M&S car park beside me, is a car. It’s quite warm, it’s very busy, and there are two young children in the car (approximately 4 and 3 years old). Alone.

We’re in semi-darkness here at Wayne Manor. I was in the powder room the other evening, when there was a POP and some of the lights went out. I say some because:

• One of the three bulbs on the upstairs hall light has fused
• The ceiling lights in the bathroom, the boudoir and the sister’s room have gone out
• The junk room glory hole study ceiling light has also conked out
• All of the plugs upstairs are in working order
• Downstairs all fine (so far)

Bats and I investigated the fuses the following evening. Now, je suis ze Queen of Ze Flatpack, and Ikea is my country. Also, I am liking to be tinkering, and have been known to reseat a tap in my time. However, I have a strict No Electricity rule. It didn’t matter, though, as we couldn’t work out a damned thing.

We have very confusing wiring in Wayne Manor.

There’s one big 30A fuse, several trip switches, and no apparent fuse box like in normal houses. It looks as if the electrics have been jerry-rigged in fits and starts by the good Dr Frankenstein, after several heavy nights on the sloe gin. I am seriously thinking it would be easier to move house than to get to the bottom of this.

So we are persevering in the semi-darkness. Not to put too fine a point on it, in case I stab one of you in the twilight, but the powder room is causing a few problems. We’re using one of Ikea’s finest stick-up battery lights, which doesn’t stick up any more, and only just produces enough light to stop one from peeing on the floor, or on one’s feet. (And yes, it has happened to me at work. It’s so much more revolting when it’s someone else’s pee.) I am in the happy exhibitionist position of not shutting the door at all, whereas Bats and the sister are not enjoying themselves one little bit. I will say this, there’s a lot less clocking in the toilet, presumably ’cause no-one can see their newspaper in there any more. However, the longterm problem of how exactly three people get through quite so much toilet roll is getting worse: now the toothpaste is vanishing. I swear, someone is eating it, and the toilet roll. Mmm. Tasty.

It’s been a shite day. All sorts of bad news within our department: bad exams, bad job interviews, bad things afoot among the patients. Bah. And now all the upstairs lights have gone out, I suspect the fuse is to blame, but am too cross to attempt changing it at this time of night. My mojo has gone bleurgh.

The only positive news is that we went shopping for fabric for my Matron of Honour Best Woman Dress (MOH sounds ghastly, I think), and got some rather lovely stuff. In the negative, it’s taking miles of the stuff to cover me, in fact, as much as it would take to upholster a three-piece suite. The healthy eating plan has failed. I am a fat lump.

Bah.

I must be spending too much time at work. Mental Arithmetic turned into Arithemetic. I don’t know what Arithemetic is, but an emetic is something that will make you barf like there’s no tomorrow. In fact, it will make you wish that there’s no tomorrow. It used to be standard treatment after ingestion of nasty things, until it was appreciated that yakking it all back up caused double the damage, not to mention the risk of inhaling yer own boke. Yuk.

Anyway, we use lots and lots of local anaesthetic, even in people who are asleep. Saves waking up with the feeling that one’s leg is hanging off (even if it is). There are, broadly, two kinds: plain stuff, and stuff with Adrenaline in it. The Adrenaline stuff is magic (I don’t mean real magic, like Santa, I mean pretend chemistry magic) because it causes all the ickle blood vessels to constrict, therefore reduces bleeding. Except that Pharmacy have run out of it. So instead of bottles with 1:10 000 strength adrenaline already in them, we’re giving up on counting in our heads and resorting to writing on the drapes with a surgical marker to work out how much of 1:1000 is required in 20mls of plain to get the right concentration. Whilst a decimal point astray is unlikely to have Shipmanesque results, it’d be bound to lead to lots of shouting. Add to that the lack of a stool for the short SHO (she stood on a wobbly drill box instead), and the fact that instrument set 1 had no scissors, set 2 had blunt scissors and the first decent pair was found on set 3, and then tell me what is wrong with the hospital? Bad, bad, bad management. Buy cheap, buy twice. My hairdresser’s scissors cost over a hundred pounds a pop; ours are under fifteen. I know we need so many more pairs, but it’s ’cause half of them are shite. Oh, but I could go on and on. At least the electricity is still working. For now.

Gosh oh, it’s been a while. Work is…hectic. I wish that people would take better care of their children. Even allowing for my resolutely non-parent status, I figure that letting nine-year-olds do dangerous things is never going to turn out well.

There are now so many jobs on the to-do list that I hadn’t even realised that FB had been shut down. I apologise, and repent, and will blog more. But not now, there’s a man coming to measure me for double glazing and the house is in a state. I must go and redd up.

We’re happily in Phuket, which is happy for two reasons:

1. The weather/hotel/husband time is all most pleasant. (If a bit hot.)

2. We almost almost almost – (like I was just about to click “Buy Flights” and phoned Bats for one last check and he said, “Let’s go someplace else!”) – were on that Bangkok Airways flight to Koh Samui. You know, the one that crashed? Thank God.  

Phuket’s hot, horribly touristy and I don’t intend to ever come back . I may as well be in Portrush (or similar), in Novemeber. It’s even raining today. I don’t mind the rain, or the countless offers of suiting, taxiing, tuktuking, massaging or nourishment. It’s more just something about me; I can’t quite put my finger on it. I think (and I say this with genuine sadness) that my insatiable desire to go places and see stuff and investigate interestingness...well, maybe I have reached satiety. I’ve wanted to go to Thailand for so long, but it’s the old story: everyone else is here already. It’s a great holiday, a good rest and some nice relaxation, but that’s about it. Or am I missing the point?

(Of course, when I come home, it’ll be the most amazing holiday I’ve ever had, right? I mean, that’s the inflexible rule of holidaying: unless there is a major disaster e.g. amoebic dysentery, then it’s the best holiday ever. Disaster is worth it for the mileage.)

(In other interesting stuff, usually my reading materials are ready and waiting for at least two weeks before a holiday. This time, last-minute-Sally was in WH Smith at Heathrow – did there used to be a different bookshop? That one is crap. Anyway, my new copy of Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure gets to page eighty-something and then there’s about forty pages of some other book entirely…and then smoothly back to page 121. I’ve missed a whole continent and at least one wife.)

Right. I’m away to eat ice-cream, and possibly lollop in the pool. Although not simultaneously.

Hey y’all. The Batmans are currently on tour, after some very frazzled work stuff for about three weeks before we left. It was so bad that I was fielding calls (and stressing) during our connection time in Heathrow. Anyway. I’m not really that important; I’m just not very good at organising any more than one person (me). Poor Batman has been utterly neglected.

So we’re off on our summer holidays, and arrived in Bangkok on Thursday. So far, all good, if a little weird. Gorgeous hotel? Check. Sultry Asian weather? Check (although the taxi driver protested yesterday that it was cold. I suppose if 31C and very sweaty is your idea of cold…). Accidental detour into the less salubrious end of town? Check. Batman offered many, many, deeply disturbing things in a very short space of time. Don’t worry, though, Dear Readers, I defended his honour.

Apparently Thai coffee, a tarlike substance filtered into a tin cup and sweetened with sugar and condensed milk, is strong enough to start a dead man’s heart. I’d believe it, and I’ll tell you this for free: it’s no surprise they drink it like that, given the way they drive. I hadn’t been in a tuk tuk for five or six years, and I’d forgotten exactly how disturbing they are for someone with such an ultra-developed sense of self-preservation as me.

We’ve had a couple of weird experiences. Well, one a day so far: first was dinner in rather a nice Japanese restaurant. The ceiling had alternate wide and narrow panels of wood, and gasps from the next table alerted us to the slow descent of the end of one of the long panels. That was fine – it just came down as if hinged. Until…a rather well-fed rat looked through the hole. Yes. To her credit, the Manageress climbed on a stool and duct-taped the panel back in place. Dinner continued as if this was perfectly normal. To be fair, it was a nice dinner.

Yesterday, we tried the night market (dreadful rubbish). It was worth two pounds, though, for 15 minutes of the most interesting therapy I have ever had: immersing feet in tanks of little fish, which nibbled delicately at the toes to remove dead skin. They all looked rather bloated after they’d finished with my crocodile-like appendages.

Oh, and Thai massage? You know how you get scented oils, relaxing music and de-stressing? No. You get a two-piece pyjama affair and a small woman kneeling on your back whilst trying to dislocate your head. She attacked me with medicinal vigour and the no-pain-no-gain mentality of a true sadist. She clicked my toes and I almost had to be worked with. Smelling salts all round. The scary part was when she had her steely thumbs drilling into both temples. With a strange detachment, I realised that if she just pressed ever so slightly harder, my skull would splinter like crockery and impale my stupefied brain. She was One Tough Lady. Of course, she was so delicate of figure and feature that she looked like she’d break in two if she sneezed.

Right, it’s day three and I need some more weird. Out we go!

Ah, it’s 01.08am and I’ve just finished a bit of horrid paperwork. The junior medical (i.e. all below consultant grade; 13 people in all) rota is made out by one of the team, and I’ve just been given the poisoned chalice. The Boss told me on Monday, and as it’s made out on a monthly basis, I have to produce one by tomorrow for dissemination before next week. In Very Excitingness, Batman’s got a job! In Astro City! And he moved home on Tuesday, car loaded with six years’ worth of stuff from Gotham. So you can imagine, on Monday I grocery shopped (as there wasn’t a single green thing in the house, and not much else either), and on Tuesday I cooked, and carried around boxes of stuff, and light sabres, and whatnot. (He really has the best pair of light sabres.) I sat down to the rota on Wednesday, and four hours later, I was no further forward. I had another four hours at it tonight, and am getting there. I’ve done one for next week, to give me a little breathing space, but it’s not much fun. Batman went up Home to visit the family,  and I was so grumpy last  night that he’s staying up there tonight. Two days of married is as much as we are used to. He’ll be back and forward to Gotham a bit over the summer, but he’s mostly home. It’s wonderful – commuting has been a gentle  introduction to married life, but I suppose we have to move in together at some point. At the very least, it’ll be good blog material, no?