Amateur Brain Surgery

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…

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…

The Nurse has spent all day lumbering along in the pouring rain, still heading steadily south, ranting about tomorrow’s strikes.

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.