Carry On Doctor

Its been a while since the Goat has had anything to write about, some say it’s because he’s going soft in his old age, some say it’s because the world is becoming a better place, these are all just nasty rumours…

Now, where to start…

Lets have a scenario to start this entry off.

Picture the scene, you’re lying in bed, struggling for breath, chest so tight that you had to check you didn’t have Vanessa Feltz still straddling you from last night, a nasty rash, stabbing pains, …ok, you get it, you’ve never Feltz so bad. You think it might be some sort of plague, you’re not sure, but you need to go to the doctors. Now maybe its just me, but the last thing I want to be doing if I feel like this is sit on the phone hammering ‘redial’ in order to make an appointment with my GP or any GP for that matter.

This latest way of dealing with GP appointments is pretty frustrating. I don’t know what its like at your own surgeries but at mine, you need to call up at 8am and take your chances. Now, you can call me cynical, but this doesn’t seem like the fairest system that you could conjure up does it? If you’re ill, you have to sit on the telephone and hope that you can get an appointment for the next two days. If you can’t, then you have to go through the process again the next day and so on. I think it needs looking into…that engaged tone on the 14th time of ringing can shred nerve endings quicker than VX gas.

So, you get your appointment, with a doctor you’ve never heard of, and head down to the surgery. Some are fairly new, some have been open since Moses needed a blood test, but they all share certain characteristics.

After the struggle to get the appointment, comes the Waiting Room.

I don’t know why Doctors surgeries waiting rooms look like this, all the ones I’ve ever been in look the same way, sure, they have different furniture and decoration but there’s just something that make them all so similar. Maybe its the air of illness, the boredom that is almost tangible, maybe, just maybe, it comes down to the reading material…

The reading material in doctors waiting rooms is not for the man who seeks knowledge about the important things in life, it’s not for the hungry minds of the young and old alike, who long to peruse the shiny covers and delve within pages that can hold such wonder…oh no, we get Motorcaravan Motorhome Monthly. I kid you not.

You didn’t believe me did you. These are really in there.

Glance around the tables littered which these publications and you can find some true gems, whats this here?

Today’s Railways UK

I can imagine the most avid of readers struggling to glean anything from this particular magazine. As riveting as any train spotter might tell you it is, you can only get so excited about the prospect of IEP out – high-speed 2 in, if I even knew what that actually meant.

But wait, there’s more, just when you thought that was your name they called out, only to realise it was the guy who came in 20 minutes after you did, your gaze falls upon what I can only describe as a mens specialist publication. For men who specialise in other men perhaps, I wont speculate.

Exercise for Men Only.

Thinly disguised as a gay magazine, I’m sure you’ll agree. Why can’t these exercise fanatics just come out of their closet?

And finally, what doctors waiting room would be complete without the philatelists wet dream, his monthly forage into the murky and dangerous world of stamp collecting. No use to your average patient of course, but there it is.

Gibbon’s Stamp Monthly.

Whoever Stanley Gibbons is, I wish him all the best on his 150th birthday, he’s doing remarkably well. It doesn’t excuse the fact that his magazine is amongst the others I’ve noted and is about as interesting as a Conservative MP. Saying that, Gibbons Stamp Monthly is sure to have more of an idea about what the average British person wants from a government. Ahem, God forbid that the Goat get political.

To be quite honest, all the staff need to do is fill the waiting rooms with magazines that flaunt boobies. The men will be happy and the women will have something to purse their lips over, we all win. Unless you’d rather find out about that latest motorcaravan…

Perhaps its cunning plan shared between doctors. Fill the waiting room with publications so mind-numbing and soul-destroying that on hearing whats actually wrong with you, its will seem positively cheerful.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, Mr Goat, but, er, you have the Black Death.”

“Oh, is that all? I thought for one awful moment that you were going to tell me Id been subscribed to Exercise for Men Only. What a relief!”

So, I wandered slightly, I started with Doctors and ended up on monthly magazines, this is what happens when you have a break away. I’ve become so slack, I almost put in a cheap joke about chocolate bars, but stopped myself just in time. I doubt it would have even raised a snicker.

I hope you will forgive the off-course rambling, I aim to deliver something even better next time…

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