It took the best part of four days to limp from London to her home town, Brighton, and she’s been as busy as a particularly vicious and scary bee ever since, getting her new identity in shape.

Her teeth were her first priority. It’s no good trying to be inconspicuous with filed pointy gnashers, but thankfully all The Nurse had to do was track down and blackmail a former Amateur Brain Surgery Club member – now (hilarously) a dentist – to get them sorted out. You should see her gorgeous new pearlies, which cover her real teeth perfectly.

Second came a new name. After digging up one of her secret cash stashes, buried for convenience in the graveyard off Bear Road thirty years ago, she could easily afford a false identity. Thank goodness for Dodgy Dave, another old ex-brain surgery cohort.

Third, somewhere to live. It was easy enough to knock off the old bat in the smart Kemptown house that The Nurse now ‘owns’ and bury the body under her small but very pretty city centre patio. Amazingly it doesn’t smell too bad out there, all things considered… but then again that’s the beauty of cold weather.

This evening The Nurse sits on her new leather settee, hunched over her new laptop, poised to write her first rant of 2012 and her first  as a free woman. If you didn’t know any better you’d think she was a respectable, smart widow about town. The thought makes her grin in a most unladylike fashion. Oh what fun this is going to be.

What’s pissing The Nurse off this evening? David Cameron’s Christian shenanigans, that’s what. OK, it was a couple of weeks ago. She’s been otherwise occupied. But it rankles like fuck.

The Nurse quite likes Cameron. Oddly, he appears considerably less Conservative than Tony Blair. But she objects strenuously to his call for Britain to declare herself a Christian nation. That’s just divisive. She thinks it’d be much more sensible to declare ourselves a secular nation that tolerates all religions, no matter how potty, whether it’s  Pastafarianism or the the spectacularly nutty Christian God botherers.

Crikey. Admittedly that wasn’t much of a rant. But it’s difficult to generate a decent head of steam and vent your spleen effectively when you’re warm, wealthy, nice-looking and popular amongst your very nice neighbours.

She actually babysat for one of the buggers last night. If only they knew she was a psycho killer with an unfortunate taste for soft, tender, well-cooked infant flesh!

In the United States there are now more people aged 65 and over than ever before. In 1900 there were 3.1 million Americans in that age group and by April 2010 this had increased to 40.3 million. And as more baby boomers reach their 65th birthdays it is anticipated that this number will increase more rapidly.

Life expectancy is increasing and many of us can expect to live into our eighties, nineties and even beyond 100. Not only are we living longer, we are staying fitter and healthier into our old age. But some see an ageing population as a potential burden on society. They are worried that the proportion of the population of working age will dwindle making it tough to maintain living standards for the dependent older population.

The answer must be revision of the way in which we retire. Instead of ceasing to work at 65 we’ll need to consider a more flexible, gradual retirement process, perhaps opting for part time work or consultancy roles in order to provide the benefit of a lifetime’s work experience.

I for one don’t want to completely stop working as I enjoy the stimulation that my work provides. It has been found that keeping the brain active can help prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s disease which is enough for me to keep working until I drop.

My plan is to get old disgracefully. As I’ve matured I’ve become increasingly less likely to become embarrassed and much more confident. For example, my singing skills are abysmal but I love to do it so I recently took to the stage at a local talent night. I picked one of my all time favourites (Great Balls of Fire) and tormented the assembled audience to my rendition of this timeless classic. The lovely people in the audience all clapped politely but it was suggested that I shouldn’t give up my day job any time soon.

So I am now compiling what is quickly becoming a very long ‘bucket list’ of other things that I would like to do before I finally shuffle off this mortal coil. Fortunately for other people there are very few singing performances in the list although I have always wanted to ride through Brighton naked while singing God Save the Queen through a megaphone, but I shall put that one at the bottom of the list.

If you want to blend in, come to London.

The Nurse, having tidied herself up somewhat in a Swiss Cottage public loo, cuts a reasonably inconspicuous figure in the big smelly.

There’s nutters galore here. A middle aged lady limping along with a Margaret Thatcher hair do, filed pointy teeth and a thunderous expression doesn’t stand out too much. Especially in a place like Oxford Street, where the loonies of the world congregate. Stand there long enough and you’ll eventually see every booby on the planet shuffle by.

Right now she’s hanging around outside the Lloyd’s of London building in The City, admiring the funky metal tubing, reminded momentarily and pleasurably of escaped intestines.

Last night she broke into a posh flat along a leafy London street and slept like a baby in the softest bed she’s experienced for decades. Then breakfasted well in a stranger’s spotless contemporary kitchen, hooking out a tin of grapefruit, a stray avocado and a chunk of fragrant pink and yellow Battenburg.

Tonight she’s walking through the wee small hours, hoping to hit Sussex by Christmas day. At this stage in the game, sleep isn’t an option.

The Nurse imagines she can taste the salty tang of the sea on the westerly breeze but it’s probably wishful thinking. The channel’s siren call always did bring out the best in her. Or the worst, depending on your perspective. If you object to having your skull trepanned when you’re least expecting it, you probably won’t like her much. If, on the other hand, you think carrying out amateur brain surgery on unwitting victims without their permission sounds like fun, she’ll see you in Brighton.

The Nurse doesn’t laugh very often. She’d laugh more if life was fucking funny, but it ain’t. Not for her, at least.

Five miles short of the ugly north London sprawl, struggling through dense, winter-dark woodland, she’s just fallen arse over tit into a filthy, stinking pond.

There isn’t a swear word in existence that can describe how she feels right now. So she’s made up a new one. Which, unaccountably given the circumstances, just made her giggle… easier said than done with a mouth full of mud.

Next time you need it, why not try ‘FUNT’? What does it mean? Fat cunt, of course.

Enjoy.

As The Nurse treks determinedly southwards, now somewhere between Bedford and Hertford, she’s mulling over the news. 

She likes Jeremy Clarkson. He’s funny. And he was obviously joking the other night when he mentioned shooting strikers.

That Union leader Karen Jennings is a po-faced cow. Has she had a sense of humour transplant or what? Down with Karen Jennings and her sour, overly-earnest, politically correct ilk. The Nurse would like to line ‘em up and shoot them too. Yah boo.

Would you prefer to live in a country where the Poor Taste Police monitored our every utterance, Ms Jennings? Presumably so.

The Nurse doesn’t like politicians much either. They’re far from funny. Dangerous too. She’s said it before and she’ll say it again: we’ve got nuclear weapons coming out of our ears, as have the Yanks and most of Europe. So why can’t Iran have a few bombs of their own to keep things fair?

If we want Iran to stop developing their nuclear capability, we need to show willing and give up our own bombs first. All these sanctions and overblown rhetoric are about as useful as poking your finger into a wasp’s nest. Our politicians are acting like arseholes. The Nurse supports Iran 100% on this one. Go Iranians.

The only problem with all this head-ranting is it makes The Nurse crosser and crosser, winding her up like a rusty spring ’til she eventually pings. Which is when people get hurt. Time to calm down a bit, sit under a dry patch of hedgerow and gnaw on that tasty piece of roadkill – sadly not identifiable but delicious – she saved from last night.

Not long ’til The Nurse reaches London. She can already see its orange glow to the south when it gets dark…

]]> http://www.amateurbrainsurgery.com/support-for-clarkson/929/feed/ 0 http://www.amateurbrainsurgery.com/the-nurses-top-20-old-fashioned-expletives/906/ http://www.amateurbrainsurgery.com/the-nurses-top-20-old-fashioned-expletives/906/#comments Wed, 30 Nov 2011 07:34:30 +0000 The Nurse http://www.amateurbrainsurgery.com/?p=906

Sadly the C word is common currency these days. It doesn’t have much shock value left.

The Nurse, sneaking along the edge of a muddy field twenty miles north of Cambridge, likes to shock. So she’s amusing herself by creating a top 20 list of old fashioned expletives to liven up the boring bad language landscape a little.

Here goes.

1. crikey
2. blimey
3. gosh
4. christ on a bike
5. christ in a barn
6. hell’s teeth
7. for heaven’s sake
8. good god
9. good grief
10. my word
11. good gracious
12. cripes
13. yikes
14. jeepers
15. cor
16. crumbs
17. holy shit
18. golly
19. gee whiz
20. buggeration

She’d love to hear your contributions…

How she despises the Unions. At a time when everyone is faced with poorer pensions, a longer working life and bigger pension contributions, they’re throwing their toys gleefully out of the pram. And their members are following suit like thousands of selfish sheep. Baaaaah.

If she worked in the public sector, The Nurse would like to think she’d see beyond her own self-involved nose and realise that everyone, wherever they work, will have to put retirement off a few years, pay more into their pensions and get a worse deal.

Striking public sector workers are acting like they’re being picked on. In reality they’re just being asked to shoulder their share of the burden gracefully, like everyone else.

That’s not what The Nurse calls cricket. She thinks the Unions have their own interests at heart. She hasn’t heard such joyful rhetoric since the Miners’ strike in the ’80s. They must be wetting themselves with excitement, so much so that they’ve forgotten to see the wood for the trees. Decisions made without context are prone to being loopy and in The Nurse’s opinion this is a stunner.

Humph. The Nurse’s foot hurts and to be honest, it doesn’t smell too good. If she was a qualified nurse, the real deal, she’d know what to do about it. But she isn’t, so she’s just forced a load of spider webs into the wound and bound it with a clean hanky she’s been saving for emergencies.

The thing is, every time she stops for a rest it gets harder to start again. So she’s keeping going, skirting the marshy, flat, chilly fens of Cambridgeshire, delighted during the day by the wide sweep of sky and serene patchwork of vast fields.

Now night has fallen, it’s more of a challenge. But she can’t afford to fanny around being ill. If the worst comes to the worst, she can always amputate. The Nurse isn’t scared of pain. Quite the reverse.

A pink sickle moon tonight, floating low-slung in the inky sky. Owls. Rustling leaves. A fox stops, observes her briefly then trots off across the ploughed field. Cold…

The Nurse adores scientists. They’re so creative.

This week’s science news includes an experiment to find out why so many dinosaur fossils display the same strange, curved death pose.

first the scientists ‘placed plucked chickens on a bed of sand for three months to see if dessication would lead to muscle contractions‘.

Apparently the chickens decayed without contorting. So the scientists tried placing seven dead chickens in cool, fresh water instead to see what happened. Almost immediately the birds’ necks and backs arched and they took on the odd position typical of so many dinosaur fossils.

Ergo, many dinosaurs died in cool, fresh water, which is what gives so many fossils their agonised-looking shape.

Crikey, The Nurse can imagine how foul (pun intended) the stench was. Really bad. Respect to gangsta scientists. Make pongs, not war.

It’s funny how life works out. Trapped in a wood for three days (or was it four?) in an ancient man-trap with cast iron jaws, The Nurse narrowly avoided being caught by the pigs. That’s the po-lice for our US readers.

If she’d been free to move, she’d have been caught. As it is, with her leg snagged and gushing blood, The Nurse just had to crouch there, muffling groans of pain while the police scurried around the bushes in their silly uniforms with their silly truncheons.

The Nurse bound her wounds with scraps of a shirt she nicked from a sleeping tramp. And set off again on her epic journey, now limping along just short of Nottingham and leaving a visible bloody trail behind her. Mulling over the deeds of Robin Hood, the mad fucker. What was wrong with the man? She’d have kept the money, not redistributed it willy nilly to a load of shiftless wankers.

As you can tell, she’s hardly in the best of moods. So hearing about NICE’s agreement to provide C-sections to women on demand has made her see proper red. If The Nurse actually paid tax she’d be livid to see her contributions being used to fund Ceasarians on demand for a load of lazy twats who can’t be arsed to give birth the normal way. She’d be even crosser if she had cancer and the drugs she needed were deemed ‘too expensive’.

Thankfully walking is one of the few ways The Nurse knows that can calm her down, shut off her intense head-rants and stop the voices…

As a Nice Middle Class Lady, I sometimes find Brighton’s seagulls a right pain in the bum.

They’re big and noisy and for some reason the buggers seem to spend most of their days yelling through my window. They wake me up too early and interrupt me when I’m reading in the garden. They nest in the crook of the neighbours’ chimney and screech non-stop 24/7. And they steal the scraps I put out for smaller birds.

On the other hand a New Scientist magazine feature this week explains there’s 50% less gulls in Britain than in the late ’70s.

When you think about it, gulls are very like us. They’re demanding, dirty,  noisy scavengers but above all they’re opportunists. Which is probably one of the reasons so many people dislike them. But they have just as much of a right to be here as we do.  If not more. They were here first.

Look at them with fresh eyes and gulls are a miracle of natural engineering, swooping on thermals and catching the breeze, graceful and balletic. I often watch them playing in the wind, shouting with pleasure as they cannon across the skies, chasing one another, tumbling through the air at breakneck speeds, executing impossibly elegant turns.

So, they’re forgiven. Bring on the gulls. Protect them. Love them. After all, despite the racket, seaside life wouldn’t be the same without them.