You may recall, with a barely stifled yawn, from previous postings that one is suffering the lack of attentions of two outfits - that branch of National Car Parks which also runs a sort of mini-hospital service on the profits known as the NHS, and the online retailer computerwebsnore which just likes keep all the profits to itself - profits which must be enormous because it doesn't actually send you any goods in return for your money.
But let us take them in turn, for today has been, shall we say curious? no, let's tell it as it is, Kafkaesque.
I have been a bit deaf lately, and inclined to fall over a lot, which I put down to my ears making me top-heavy, being full of waxy substances. I thought if I got the aforementioneds syringed all might be well, and suggested as much to a GP in our local "health" centre, which really ought to display a sign saying "PATIENTS WILL NOT TOLERATE ABUSE FROM RECEPTIONISTS". But people whose ear'oles are full of wax are neither interesting nor remunerative in these more enlightened times, when practices earn rather large sums if they can prove that they have punctured enough people to meet their targets for people-puncturing, so, to make life more interesting, he sent me to a very important specialist in case I might have had a stroke. Causing my lug'oles to be syringed there and then didn't occur to him. The practice no longer does it, for it is not Profitable. Well, I didn't think I'd had a stroke (or a Tia Maria as they call it nowadays so you don't get frightened when your legs stop working and you acquire a lopsided grin and dribble a lot), and the stroke specialist certainly didn't. In fact we were having a very interesting conversation about Renaissance polyphony when I was suddenly and unceremoniously thrown out by the bouncers ("Your parking ticket has expired.")
Move to NCP walk-in centre, Blackpool, last Sunday evening ("brakes - exhausts - MOTs - ear syringing"). Bored nurse inserts hosepipe in lug'oles and turns tap on. T-shirt gets soaked. Ears go stone deaf. Nurse holds up sign saying "Treatment complete. Now go away."
I remembered this when I turned up for Act III at Fleetwood Hospital this morning. They couldn't give me a hearing test there and then because my ears were bunged up with wax (o yes they were...) , so they had to find somebody with a hosepipe and access to a tap, which took an hour (though the BBC's gardening magazine for June 2008 had a very interesting article about onions, which I took the opportunity to memorise).
In due course the lug'oles were hosed out again, and again I went deaf, and then it was time for the hearing test, upon which all depends.
Now when my dear wife had a hearing test a couple of years ago, her experience of modern NCP practices (which basically start with the letter B and end with "ungling") left her with a perforated eardrum, so when I got home she wrote me an anxious little note asking if the hearing test was conducted in a soundproofed room. "Well, no, actually", I wrote back (we were in the kitchen at the time). "I couldn't hear the test for the sound of the tester rattling away on the computer and the two ladies in the corridor discussing what they were going to have for their tea, not to mention the noise of the air-conditioning."
And the verdict? Suitably Kafkaesque. "Come back in three months and we'll do the tests again."
I think the problem is that I don't have horizontal giddiness, but vertical. The room doesn't spin when I turn over in bed, but if I look up I am likely to fall over, and I have innumerable bumps and contusions on my forehead from tying up my shoelaces. I'm obviously not textbook. They wanted me to say the room did indeed spin when I turned over in bed, but it didn't. They pushed a red-hot poker up my bottom and asked me if the room did spin, as all the all the authorities on the matter say it ought, and I have a feeling that they wanted me to say yes, indeed, spin is what it did do, but I couldn't, for it didn't, and eventually they gave in, and looked puzzled. There is apparently nothing in the literature, you see, about people who look up into their plum tree and fall flat on their backs in consequence.
Next, that other non-service outfit that we pour our hard-earneds into, computerwebgroansnorecaymanislandsgotcher.com. They promised today to refund £117 and 56p "in due course."
Nothing, of course, to do with my local Trading Standards Authority, who have all the correspondence. Pure coincidence, it must be. And how dare a mere customer pour scorn on a highly reputable company (they must be - their web-site says so) that simply slipped up and accidentally failed to keep their side of the contract? Or any stock records?
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It's been a good day for Kafka. A friend's daughter went to the dentist's to repair a crown that had come loose, but it came off and she swallowed it, all £200-worth of it.
And blow me! We did a civic service for this bloke who's on the front page of the local rag only a fortnight ago. Obviously a case of mistaken identity, and sub judice and all that, so one must not comment, but what with dodgy lords in the same postcode area we are starting to wonder round here whether all those people who moved to Marbella haven't decided that it's a lot cheaper to live in Knotty End.
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