King of Excellent (according to Scaryduck)

Wednesday, November 24

I hope I am not to expect this from my own family...

My recent foray into, and first overnight stay in Morriston Hospital on the outskirts of Swansea (not a stones throw from where everyone's driving licence, car registration document, and tax details are stored) has left me with tales I have to tell.

I found myself spending the night in a ward for people with chest problems (does Jordan ever get into places like this?), and the combined room age must have been in the upper 500s, which is worrying when there were only 6 people in there. 3 of the gentlemen were hard of hearing, which seemed to mean they thought that they could drop their guts and because they couldn't hear it, no one else could. The fact of the matter was after an hour of lights out it was sounding like a great northern brassband competition. Wafting in and out of consciousness (mostly due to the high methane and carbon dioxide emissions) I was regularly woken up by a little chinese nurse with "Bwud pweshuuur, Bwud pweshuuur" or "Tempwachuuuuur" as she had to do routine checks on me hourly throughout the night.

I was across the ward from a rather more prominent old man. I reckon he'd been a Judge or Tax inspector at some point. He just had that look about him. Anyway, in a bad game of cards one night, I think he has lost his marbles. To stop him from falling out of his bed, the nurses have raised the sides of the bed. He decides for reasons I will go into in a minute, that he wants out of bed. He can't get past the bars very easily, so procedes to strip completely to slide between the bars and the end of the bed. Now sat in the chair alongside completely naked, he pages the nurse. 2 Nurses (chinese friendly one and battleaxe 'all-men-are-pigs' one) appear and say to him "Bill! What are you doing out of bed?" Much to my dismay he says he's worried about the people behind the clock (!) but I think it must be my semi-conscious state and shrug it off. they get him back into bed, and I just start to slip back into the land of nod when he cries out "For god's sake, do something. There's hundreds of them behind there!"

How can a man sleep well after that...