Page 333, warfarin and Shakespeare's sister

Poor MG! No wonder he topes so :) (That has nothing to do with sharks, by the way!) After a couple of months of too much work, too many representations, too many 'personal' issues', he finally gets a 'little success' last week and a colleague walks away without a racist label stuck to his back. So, he decides to sit down, have some fish (that much, at least, we have in common :) and perhaps a large cognac with his 'doppio' and then take the afternoon off, prior to working all weekend.

The first mouthful had no sooner left his plate on its brief but fateful journey to his mouth when the mobile phone goes off! After a mad scramble to get it out before Tommy Tucker's 'High heel sneakers' dies away, more news! His mother has fallen. Again! Now that's not fallen in the biblical sense. That's fallen, face down, where your nose hits the kerbstone first! Thankfully, a friend is with her and will take her to A & E (Accident & Emergency). Nonetheless, he still spends 4 hours in A & E, still needs to walk the dog and feed the cat because they are keeping her in overnight. And do the same, early Saturday morning. She's on 'warfarin', an anti coagulant, and there are dangers when the bleeding does not stop so they generally keep her in to be safe.......Funny how they feed rat poison to humans!

This means Friday afternoon/evening's gone, Saturday's gone and it's still work on Sunday! It seems I'm not the only one God has it in for!

Oh, she's fine. CT scan came back clear on Saturday afternoon! She's back home! Tho' she looks like she's done ten rounds with Mike Tyson!

It's funny, the first time it happened and he found her 'away with the fairies', with a subdural haematoma, on the living room floor. His abiding memory is not of the five hours 'on the table' , while they lifted chunks of her skull away from the 'bleeder', while they drained the blood, that refused to clot. Not of sitting in a gloomy waiting room with only instant coffee to relieve the pressure, in the same hospital as his father had died. And Rory Gallagher, the year before that. Not of the thought that, at that age, there is less of a chance that you wake up afterwards.

No, his abiding memory is of the cute, little, blonde nurse singing Shakespeare's Sister's 'Stay with me' in a voice of liquid crystal to his mother in 're-sus' before surgery! He says it's because it was so much better than the original, and so....... appropriate, but..........Male?...... Human? Yeah, that's what I thought too! :)

However, watch out, Maddy Prior, if that little nurse ever decides to switch professions, you could be in trouble!

I don't know if they still do, though they certainly used to, but they repointed the brickwork in London's sewers with mortar that was mixed with broken glass. They then lace the rat-bait, which the rats eat, with warfarin so that when the rats licked the waste fat from 10 million washing-up bowls off the sewer walls they would lacerate their tongues and pads and thus bleed to death. Seemed a heartless way to kill a pest to me. Doesn't really work either. There are still 6 or 7 times more rats in London than people, even allowing for the massive influx of Eastern Europeans in recent years.

It's quite understandable of course, foreign emigres congregating together in cities. They are isolated from the 'mother' country, language, culture and so seek each other out. A little piece of home in an alien country. Where MG lives, they're all Poles. So much so, that the local newsagent stocks Polish newspapers, the local convenience stores stock Polish food, the local bookshop now stocks books in Polish. He says that it makes life a bit more interesting, if a little bit disconcerting. You join the queue in the local supermarket and you don't hear English much. All the conversations going on around you are in Polish! Or Ukrainian. They've started to arrive in numbers now. Oh well at least it means a buoyant rental market!