Take your own entertainment

“DOCTORS’ AND dentists’ waiting-rooms are not the pleasure palaces they once were,” complains a Perth reader.

“Always falling over or getting into fights and breaking bones as a boy in Dundee, I spent a lot of time in waiting-rooms to have my minor wounds stitched and bandaged or my broken teeth repaired or extracted.

“I found the magazines fascinating, as we could not afford material like The Scots Magazine, The Reader’s Digest or Punch. I grew up with them, often wishing I could have borrowed them when I was called in for treatment in the middle of a fascinating yarn.

“In recent years, I had been finding the selection less and less to my taste, then magazines disappeared altogether from waiting rooms as they were deemed unhygienic and liable to spread disease from patient to patient.

“Luckily, doctors and dentists seem to have had a conversion and magazines have reappeared. Unfortunately, they are now of no interest to me whatsoever, being mostly very girlie – ‘Hello!’, fashion magazines, ‘The Field’ and the like.

“As, in my dotage, I have resumed my acquaintance with the medical and dental professions, but for very different reasons, I have been forced to find other ways of amusing myself as I await my call to arms.

“I still use the magazines, but I use them only as solid rests for my newspaper crosswords which I am careful to take along to each visit!”