Somehow i never posted this yesterday. I just discovered it sitting here in ‘draft’ form. So here it is.
I spent quite some time this morning listening to a recorded voice thanking me for being patient and telling me I was 15th, later 12th, for quite some time 7th, and eventually Number 1 in the list of callers waiting to get though to the receptionist at our local medical practice. This was because of the “high volume of calls (they) are currently receiving”. I could have pressed a button (number 1, I think) to retain my place in the queue and have them call me back when my turn popped up but I decided just to hang on and sit it out. Waiting for them to call, I still would have had difficulty going out for a run, for example. I had no intention of discussing medical matters while out on the path. Nothing desperately serious, but still I had no intention of sharing it with a wider public.
Besides, I could sit and read my novel while I more or less ignored the voice in the background. The clinic used to do an online service but this has been discontinued as it kept crashing, again ““high volume of calls (they) are currently receiving”.
Eventually I got through to a real live human who shunted me down another track. My doctor of choice is not available for days, so would ai like the clinical pharmacist to call me to discuss things? Goodness, pretty soon we’ll be operating the way I remember things working in France long ago, when many people would go to their local pharmacist, explain their symptoms and be given medication accordingly and much more cheaply than if they went to to their GP. Maybe they still do things that way.
As far as I am aware my GP’s slow service has nothing to do with the doctors’ strike, but they suffer from a real shortage of doctors. So I accepted a call from their clinical pharmacist, who prescribed me a short course of antibiotics. All good.
In the meantime the “gutterman”, who had promised to remove the small forest of sycamore seedlings which has sown itself in our gutters, arrived. (We has a similar but even more extensive forest on the grass in the garden until Phil mowed the grass during the last sunny weekend. The sycamore tree in the grounds of the pub next door has gone crazy this year, scattering it’s helicopter seeds everywhere.) I had asked the next door neighbours if they wanted our gutterman to attack their forest as well but they declined, on the grounds that the man of the house, a builder, would go up his ladders and sort it out, dealing with ours at the same time if we wanted him to do so. His method was, he assured us, superior. As this promise/ offer has been around, unfulfilled, for the last two years we decided a possibly inferior gutterman in the garden was worth a longstanding promise in the air! The gutterman attacked only our gutter-forests!
Our house is three storeys high at the back. The gutterman did not go up his ladders but used a vacuum-cleaner contraption on an extremely long, telescopic pole, to suck the gunk out of the gutter. The window-cleaner, who recommended the gutterman to us, uses a hosepipe on a similar telescopic pole when he cleans the windows. George Formby would be hard-pressed to work a song out of that!
The gutter at the front (a mere two storeys high) was much denser and more prolific. He went up his ladders and scooped the gloop and threw it down into the garden. Job done! It may not be perfect but the rain should now run along the guttering and down the drainpipe as intended, rather than splashing down the walls and windows. And we now have his number for future occasions.
Having got that out of the way, and having received a “ping” to tell me my prescription was ready in the pharmacy in the village (that was quick!) I walked into the village, planning to collect my antibiotics and then catch a bus to Uppermill. There I would visit the hardware shop before walking on to Tesco in nearby Greenfield, thus possibly making up for the run I did not so this morning.
The pharmacy was closed for lunch! In former times all shops closed for lunch but this is the only one I know of at the moment. Had it been open I would just about have had time to collect my prescription and catch the bus. Now it would open two minutes after the bus was due There is a stop opposite the pharmacy. The bus then proceeds to turn around in a housing estate on the edge of the village before returning through the village to stop outside the coop store, almost opposite the first stop.
An elderly lady was waiting at the stop opposite the pharmacy. She only wanted to go three stops up to the housing estate but she had been waiting a good twenty minutes. I joined her and we had a chat. Of course the bus was late, but if I had gone into the pharmacy, which was now open, no doubt it would have arrived and gone round the village at breakneck speed just so that I could miss it. The bus arrived, we got on, the elderly lady got off a few stops later, and then the bus stopped outside the coop store. The driver got out and went into the store to buy a can of fizzy pop! Had I realised he planned to do this I would have asked him to be sure to wait while I nipped into the pharmacy. Too late!
In Uppermill I bought a couple of electrical odds and ends from the hardware shop and went on my way to Tesco. Laden with cartons of fruit juice and other stuff, I waited for yet another bus. Instead pf alighting at Delph Crossroads, the stop nearest to home, I stayed on until the village centre and finally picked up my medication from the pharmacy!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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