Lake Winderlake; Mount Snowmount...

Just a minor point, for news people ignorant of (or should that be 'over'?) the finer points of the language that pays their wages.

The '-mere' suffix in Windermere means 'lake', so 'Lake Windermere' is tautologous. The '-don' in Snowdon means hill, or mount, from Old English, so Mount Snowdon is similarly tautologous.  The suffix '-don' in OE also meant 'valley', which is logical enough if you're standing on your head while admiring Snowdon, or merely looking at it through the winder.

I've taken the pledge, Your Honour

NHS - the No Hope Service

My medical record now shows that I am 5' 6" tall and weigh 13st 11lb, which makes me practically spherical, with a body mass index approaching infinity. Or zero - I never could get my head round reciprocals or metric units. No wonder my BP was up. 152/76, to be precise, systole exactly double diastole, which is handy to remember. I could do with losing a few pounds to bring me back into the appropriate percentile for my age, but I'm borderline. Tum turning into a corporation, but that's genetic. My dad's waist measurement was more than double his inside leg, which made his trousers roughly equilateral triangles in front or rear elevation.

It was my annual check-up at the asthma clinic a couple of days ago. In our village practice you are likely to go in for your check-up perfectly healthy and come out in a hearse, so I give the village practice a wide berth, and attend a branch in the next village, where patients are less likely to be verbally abused by Reception Gorgons under a sign that proclaims that the NHS does not tolerate abuse of its staff by patients, especially those who have still managed to stay alive, despite.

My asthma nurse knows absolutely everything about everything, because she follows a flow-chart on her screen which tells her what questions to ask. A bit like a call centre. If my answers don't fit the pattern they are ignored. In vain have I been saying for years that aftershaves and perfumes are far more likely to trigger severe asthma attacks in susceptible people than cigarette or pipe smoke. Two years ago it took one extremely intelligent nurse to spot an anomaly in my cholesterol readings, and submit a blood sample for analysis. Almost entirely good cholesterol. It's on my medical record. I shouldn't have to remember it - nurses with their faces turned to computer screens should see it, flashing on and off in red.

But that isn't really the point. When I got home from this 'check-up' which would have me on a diet of lettuce and statins in perpetuity I weighed myself. I am my usual 12st 5lb, not 13st 11lb.

I endured a 30-minute lecture from a nurse who can't convert kilograms to pounds.

God forbid that she ever prescribes me a painkiller. It would be a hundredweight of morphine, qid.

PS 3 July


Now have my own sphygmomanometer. Calibrated. BP consistently 138/60. When The Times has finished exposing rum practices in the banking industry and/or Jersey it might like to have a look at our village practice.

A dungarees thing

You can forgive children for not being fully clued-up on such things as geography and countries of the world and language and therefore making boo-boos in their compositions, for a little knowledge is, as the adage reminds us, a dungarees thing.


But we should be less inclined to forgive the writer of the following (who just happens, coincidentally, to be American, a fact hardly worth mentioning) in a best-selling thriller -


"It is so wonderful to make your acquaintance," he said with a faint Swiss accent.


No? Well, think about it.