Food thoughts of home

The case notes two weeks later recorded DVT and PE. DVT's a deep vein thrombosis; PE's not exactly physical exercise, either.

(A single cheering note, the patient file also announced a height to weight ratio as "average", the possible result of claiming to be 9ft 6in. A tall story, as they say.)

All this at a time of endless endoscopy within NHS innards, and of worrying headlines about Darlington Memorial, where the second incarceration occurred.

Detailed comment would be ill-informed and presently inadvisable. Some sharp scratches (as they say when burnishing the blood kit) must therefore suffice.

Because this company offers its employees medical insurance, Gadfly was a private patient. "Private" is not necessarily a synonym for "privileged".

The food in Darlington Memorial may well be perfectly pleasant when it leaves the kitchen. By the time it permeates the extremities, however, it gives new meaning - ask the trolley staff - to the phrase "Nil by mouth". Like the egregious Bunter, we lived forever in hope of a food parcel from home.

The room had neither telephone nor television, though a television was eventually provided. Everyone, even the consultant, commented on how perishing cold it was. Complaints were met with repeated shrugs, perhaps a means of keeping warm.

All departments claim chronic overwork, serious staff shortage, soaring sickness levels. A nurse broke down in tears on entering the room - "it's been an awful day" she said - another (so good he could nurse for England) worked a ten hour shift without even time to go to the toilet. It was impossible, some said, infallibly to meet the incessant demands upon them.

The hospital, of course, is in the middle of health secretary Alan Milburn's own constituency. Should he really want to know what ails the NHS, he might forsake the far away emperor's palace for a couple of uncomfortable nights in Ice Station DMH.

THE greatest advantage of a single room is that it excludes much of a hospital's pervading, pernicious noise.

An occasional ward round, however, exposed the sound of breaking wind, so vigorously sustained that we wondered if there might be a Petomane among the patients.

(Le Petomane, it will be recalled, was a Victorian music hall artiste who found fame and fortune through flatulence. Even Queen Victoria was said to be amused, perhaps because he stood up to play the national anthem, whilst the King of the Belgians travelled incognito for a command performance.)

Incorrigibly, irresistibly, we were reminded of an early learning ditty popular in long gone days at Timothy Hackworth Junior Mixed....

There was a young fellow called Carter

Who was a most musical farter

He could play anything

From God Save the King

To Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

Whether Beethoven wrote a Moonlight Sonata is a matter of doubt, but in those days even the schoolyard scatologists had to scan.

ABIRD outside the sick room window, incidentally, had all but mastered the opening lines of Here We Are Again, Happy As Can Be. Whilst the philosophy might have been questionable, the air was sweeter altogether.

OUR own two little warblers, when very much younger and more innocent, composed a song - or rather the first line of a song - in scornful salute to the clapped out trains on some of the North Wales lines.

To the tune of John Brown's Body, the thrice repeated line was "Cronky old banger is the name not to choose...."

Last week, back in the land of her fathers, we discovered that on the Conwy Valley line from Llandudno to Blaenau Ffestiniog the same 40-year-old stock shuffling arthritically up and down.

To railwaymen they're 101s, unseen on North-East branches for almost two decades and unlamented even then. Their filthy, feeble condition made the front page of the North Wales Weekly News. "Some trains on that line are not the newest," riposted a North West Trains spokesman, and spun himself into the final of Great Euphemisms of All Time.

THE medics recommend walking instead, an exercise in which we not only stumbled upon the hamlet of Langton, but contrived to take a wrong turn whilst about it.

Langton's somewhere between Gainford and Ingleton, in Teesdale, last heard of by Northern Echo readers in 1968 when a United bus was discovered there.

Unsurprisingly, the service did not last. If the penny drops correctly, its other claim to fame is that its telephone kiosk- still-red, its directories near-virginal - is the North-East's least patronised. The most frequently engaged, should memory also ring true, is that cluster of four in Durham Market Place.

The wrong turn led past the Selaby estate, one of Lord Barnard's, three verdant miles in which we were passed only by a chap on a push bike who stopped to praise the little duck pond and nature reserve that Duggie Nesbitt ("used to play cricket for Raby Castle") has created on his farm.

It was about time Duggie got some publicity, he said, and if that weren't enough we put 20p in Langton's call box and may simultaneously have been its first foot.

It's an ill wind, as possibly they say in Ice Station Memorial.

Pear-shaped, much in vogue, may have been made popular by The Bill but first took off in the RAF. "The underlying metaphor is not entirely clear, but probably it's nothing more mysterious than the notion of the pear as a sphere gone wrong," notes Twentieth Century Words.

The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English pinpoints it to Duxford Air Show, June 17 1984, when thunder storms upset the flying down and the public address announced that things had gone pear-shaped. After that, it just grew wings.

Having got that right, we note the passing last week of John Morgan, 41, regarded not only as the modern Mr Manners - and author of a wonderful etiquette column in The Times - but said to have been the man who dissuaded William Hague from the folly of wearing a baseball cap. Morgan and several million others.

In his wardrobe, it's reported, police found 300 monogrammed shirts, 90 pairs of hand-made shoes and 60 Savile Row suits. Against that background, it was surprising to read in the Telegraph that he was born in Sunderland and, more surprising yet, to see in other obituaries that he was Scottish.

The explanation, apparently, is that he was born in Sutherland. It's a mistake any of us can make. We usually blame the copytakers.

STILL with the Top People's Paper, Tom Dobbin in Durham sends Times crossword number 21,451 - 14 down, "Died away from place in Yorkshire - an American cemetery". The answer, though not as in Yorkshire, is Darlington. "Another bloody southern compiler" says Tom.

More modern manners, this time as practised in South Bank. In his recently published and largely vilified autobiography, the conjuror Paul Daniels recalls a childhood Sunday dinner at which the subject of Mrs Thwaites, one of his teachers, arose. "Thwaites" on Teesside is pronounced "Twaites". Somewhat injudiciously, the young Daniels revealed her nickname and received a Sunday belt. To this day, he insists, he has never again used such language. Just, as someone else once said, like that