two thousand and six

happy new year my friends. i hope that you are all dusting off your gym memberships and promising to be a little nicer to your fellow humans in the months to come.

i managed to forget the travails of my special christmas nights on call with a quick sojourn to the countryside (ah how the urban squalor is being knocked out of me as time ticks on) for new year weekend and a meeting of minds with my dear vegas oop north on tuesday. a grand round if you like. i think that, having missed out on any human contact outside of work over the holiday period, this period of post-nights recuperation has been extremely therapeutic for my emotional wellbeing. i shall return to work tomorrow beaming. i do have the weekend to do but let's set that to one side.

vegas and i did not make any headway in the search for life/job satisfaction. there were no answers to be found and we have conceded that four months after starting our blogs we are no better off. we did however discover that rio ferdinand is a waste of space and that jose antonio reyes should perhaps be referred to a local falls assessment programme. we also found out that it is possible to dance without a care in a club filled with less than twenty people if the Arcade Fire are playing and enough Red Stripe/whisky has passed over the bar (the venue happened to a be a local indie nightspot and as such was "filled" with A-level students as comes with the music - how old we felt and looked).

the news has been eyeopening and tearshedding in equal measure over the new year period. there appears to be a glut of horrible things happening to young children. i am never sure if this reflects a Catholic degeneration of our society or whether we are just more aware of such sinister goings on as a result of increased reporting.

incidentally, i did note that the ex-director of NICE (national institute for cost effectiveness) was struck off for perving over kids on the internet. well, grooming teenagers on chatrooms actually. he has since resigned from his position as director of the Institute's Interventional Procedures Programme. suspiciously, a week before that, all catheter ablations were cancelledby an oxfordshire NHS trust. (an interventional procedure whereby the electrical wiring system in the heart is altered to prevent funny unpleasant heart rhythms.) coincidence? i don't think so... you just don't know how deep the conspiracy goes. straight to the president. they knew about it all along, etc etc

i also watch with trepidation at the progress of Ariel Sharon more for what it will mean for the middle east (those three words are now the stock epithet for the Israel-Palestine conflict) which by the way is surely high on the "most depressing things about the age you live in" list. besides if he's on the neurosurgical ward he's probably been left without any fluids and his urinary catheter clamped, whilst the infected bedsore slowly disseminates MRSA to his bloodstream. much like the poor bastard i was referred at 4am on christmas morning ("perhaps you would like to prescribe him some antibiotics that might actually kill the bacteria responsible for his sepsis rather than just give him the shits and make his life even more miserable" was my final suggestion before leaving).

this new year i shall also be keeping a close eye on the activities our dear health secretary who is fast becoming the government's Emperor Palpatine to our pathetic rebel workforce. soon you shall feel the awesome power of her fully operational private health service.

i do, as always, have a theory.

it is my fear her multiple trips across the galaxy via some kind of interdimensional wormhole excavated from beneath the desert in Egypt may have affected her mental health. worse still, i suspecting that she may be currently influenced by some kind of symbiotic all-powerful alien being who, inhabiting her human body and feeding off her very life energy, is hellbent on crushing any decent medical care for this country's people whilst simultaneously strangling the motivation of its doctors. we shall see.

Patricia Hewitt, Health Secretary, pictured above fielding questions from journalists

James Spader, actor, pictured above in "Stargate"

[i am listening to Liezah by The Coral]
[i have just finished reading We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. absolutely amazing - i did hate the main character for most of the book and then you read the last three chapters. i was blown away. certainly one for your list.]