Amateur Brain Surgery

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.

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.