If admin doesn’t get you the PC corps surely will

Two or three weeks ago, I underwent a particularly unpleasant procedure at the William Harvey Hospital. As always, the staff were superb and did much to relieve my misery. Last Thursday, I arrived for a CT scan, only to be told that the previous procedure was to be performed before my scan.

I tell you this, not because I am one of those who revels in regaling all and sundry with their medical histories but to point out that the procedure would have been repeated because of an administrative error.

I am becoming convinced that the administrators have got it in for me. Some years ago they put back appointments with a consultant for two or three years without explanation or apology.

As it happened this time, after a wait of around 45 minutes, I was told there had been a mistake and I only needed the scan.

Helen, the nurse who dealt with me was an angel, even though she stuck a needle into my arm.

“Just a small scratch,” she said as she plunged it into a vein.

“That, I said, was nothing like a scratch. Why didn’t you call it a little prick?”

“We’re not allowed to say that,” she said. Some meat-headed PC idiot had was to blame. I think that Helen and I were actually of similar minds about this.

In the evening I went with Mrs B to the new Bauhaus cafe upstairs in the old Merchant Chandler’s building in North Street. On the way there, we were most impressed by this year’s Christmas lights display – mainly down the High Street but also through Park Mall.

We went to the Bauhaus to hear a young lady – Dulcie May Moreno – sing jazz with style and assurance. She had a voice to charm the birds down from the trees.

Ms Moreno was more than ably accompanied by guitarist Steve Bridgeland.

Between the two of them, they made this old man very happy. All in all, about 35 people attended the performance and very few felt that their conversation was more interesting than the music.

In my view, to talk through a performance by a duo such as this is no less than insulting.

This fine duo will be back at the Bauhaus on January 19.

‘I am becoming convinced that the administrators have got it in for me’