Well then, 2018. I mean, what the actual?

Shadow and light on Marine Drive, Morecambe: 8 Jan 2019

I don't think I knew what a bad year was till 1998. That was my first one. I had my fair share of adolescent misery but it was all standard issue (even the Thatcherism was standard issue, as I was unaware that there were alternatives, like a war baby only with more vitamin C, and, temporarily, milk) and I knew it was transient. 1998 was different - everything changed: I split up with my Significant Ex, spent some time living off Spar lager and Bombay Mix, chopped a lot of wood while listening to Ani DiFranco mix tapes, and got a tattoo. It doesn't sound so traumatic, really, does it? And with hindsight, yeah, fair point. But I genuinely did not know why this was all happening to me, at least till I got some therapy, and for a while I was very freaked out that I was not the person I had long thought myself to be.

That new person had to get another job, for reasons, and in early 1999, she did. It wasn't the right job, so she got another one - at NGO X - in early 2000, at which point she felt fairly sure that she had finally found her tribe. This, she thought. This is where I live now.

And you know, ups and downs, squalls and storms, a bit of existential bleakness, but the next 12 years, pretty good on the whole. Most of them are obliquely documented on this here website but tl;dr = when there was adversity, it was generally overcome, and along the way, at the risk of sounding like something someone would put on a cushion, there was a lot of love and laughter.

Then we made the Great Leap Northwards, and *that* year was a whole new deal. New house, new way of living, new dying mum. Same boyfriend, same job, but everything else was swirling strangeness, and much of it not of the good kind. It was another 'shit, who am I?' year, and I did not enjoy much of it very much at all.

When my mum died, I was so sad I didn't know what to do with myself. I also thought I was probably dying myself, of non-specific everything disease (kind of what did for her, to be honest), and I went to the doctor's.

I got the kind of GP that is nearly retired, the kind that wears a cardigan, and has seen a lot of people who think they're dying because their mum just died. He was so lovely to me. He said, well, we'll do some blood tests just in case but I think probably you just need to give this time, and he printed off an A4 page with a list of sensible things to remember to do (eat vegetables, sleep, go for a walk etc). I still have that piece of paper in my bag, and every now and again I pull it out to remind myself of the basics.

Grief does what it does, but it does eventually ease (though it will come back for another go every now and again). The year after, I reached the top of the allotment waiting list, and each season, as we clear a little more and grow a little more, I sit on one of the chairs up there (which belonged to M's late mum) and feel I am coming back to myself, albeit a self that will never quite be the same.

And we live here now, we know how it works. There are aspects of life in Ecoville that I will never love, and we have conflicts that may never get resolved, but no one's accused me of anti-vegan hate crime for a while (indeed the man who did has taken his business elsewhere, much to my relief). And so many things about living here are amazing, and so many of the people are too, and we are all, I think, gradually coming through the forming and storming. Who knew it would take so long? (Oh, everyone who's ever done it, duh).

So I wasn't expecting to step into an avalanche last year, but I did. And just like Leonard says, it covered up my soul.

I guess it started in February, when NGO X had a major crisis. It wasn't something I was directly involved in, but it had a profound effect on me and many of the people I love. It shone light into some dark corners, catalysed some long-overdue conversations and actions, and generally prompted the kind of soul-searching that is hard enough to do in private, and extraordinarily difficult to do in full media (and social media) glare. My faith in humanity did not grow in those months. What grew instead was anger at the horrendous pressure the situation put on the people trying to deal with it - most of them conscientious, thoughtful, compassionate, talented humans who were stretched, some of them, to breaking point. A surprising number of them are still standing, still doing their jobs, and I honestly do not know how. I spent a couple of weeks in March doing some direct support (not even on anything sensitive), and I encountered a lot of thousand yard stares.

The fallout also, obviously, had an impact on funding, and before too long it was clear that if there was reduced project funding, there would need to be a commensurate reduction in the functions supporting them. There was a Change Process. I've been through many of these (including one where they literally forgot about me till afterwards, which was interesting) and they are usually fairly predictable affairs, even those which are financially, rather than strategically, driven. This one was different, in that it was executed largely behind closed doors, with much of the work being done by the very same people who were already halfway on their knees. Most of the rest of us mooned around, feeling a bit useless and a bit anxious, and wondering if it was worth starting anything new.

Not me, so much. I had two chunky pieces of work to do, both of which were providing direct support to programme teams, and one of which involved a programme visit. I hardly ever get to do this kind of thing, and I was really looking forward to it. There's only really me doing the kind of thing that I do, and I have to say no to most of the requests that come my way, so I wasn't feeling too worried. I thought my post might move, I thought it might change, and I could see the logic in both of those things, but I didn't think it would be cut. Specifically, the change proposal was due to be shared with staff on a Tuesday, with those whose jobs were significantly affected to be told on the Monday. The Saturday before that, I flew to Yangon to kick off one of those pieces of work. They surely wouldn't let me fly all that way, I thought, to let me start something they weren't going to let me finish, and to tell me that when I would be on my own for 12 days in a city where I knew nobody. In the rainy season. No, they'd tell me before I left. I even had a meeting in my calendar with my manager for the previous Thursday, and it got cancelled. Nothing to see here. Let's go do stuff.

Yeah. No. I worked a full jet-lagged day in an office where you leave your shoes outside and everyone is *incredibly* polite, got thoroughly drenched on my way back to the hotel because I had no idea how hard it could rain in June and my umbrella was not up to the job, then spent half an hour getting Skype working so I could learn that I wasn't going to have a job anymore. The edict that everyone should be told on the same day was apparently in order that it should be "fair". Fair on whom, I am not sure. It was epically shit for me, and it was probably almost as shit for the person who had to tell me - she had to have that conversation, or a version of it, about 20 times in succession. Whoever wrote *that* slide did not know the difference between equality and equity, and, frankly, fucking well should have. I expected more. Something broke that day.

I have another little post to come about how that experience brought me a whole new imaginary friend, which was useful, because I was powerfully lonely the whole time I was there. People did get in touch with me - indeed I had beery, teary Skype chats most evenings - but there was no one who could actually touch me. I grew some kind of shell. When I got home I couldn't shake it off, and that was before the extra fun of having to answer the 'how was your trip?' question over and over again.

In theory I could have fought to keep my job, or some job, at NGO X. There was a consultation period, there were hypothetical options. But I was done. I knew I was done, although it took me a while before I could say it out loud. Eighteen years is a relationship. And I didn't see it coming, so I had no idea what to do next. It was all very bewildering. And then of course, in the middle of a season of weddings and funerals, M was diagnosed with bladder cancer.

I think September was the worst month. I was having apocalyptic dreams already, then (in real life) my dad ended up in hospital, one of my best friends lost her mum, and Ecoville decided it was finally time to stir up the mud at the bottom of the Great Food Wars pond. It would have been a pretty intense time even in a good year. I gradually realised that I couldn't have proper conversations, couldn't hold thoughts for any length of time, couldn't concentrate at work, couldn't read books, couldn't do anything very much apart from just about stop myself screaming. Everything was very loud and bright and I could not filter anything properly. Jo, I said to myself one lunchtime, as I was crying into my soup, I think you probably need some help.

And, well, I got some. I called up NGO X's 'employee assistance programme', and they sorted me out with some telephone counselling within a couple of days. I also went to the doctor's. And so it was that within the space of a week three people (the initial EAP screening person, the counsellor, and the GP) asked me if I was thinking about taking my own life. I wasn't (I really wasn't), but it was all a bit whoah, is this where this might be going? I will say that I've had 'who am I' times before, but this was my first 'why am I', and it was pretty scary.

However. The counselling sessions stopped me panicking. We took the big old snarled up ball of wool that was in my head and teased the threads out of it one by one. It was helpful. I wrote little notes in pencil in a little notebook. I was allotted six sessions, and after the first three, I spread them out further and further apart, and I could see that every time we spoke, things were more manageable than the last time. That was also helpful. And the GP, well, the GP was great. She did a little test of my anxiety levels (high! But we knew that!) and depression levels (medium) and we talked about what to do. I asked about medication, and she said well, do you think you need the extra help? Yes, I said. Yes, right now I do.

I had never taken any head meds before, and I started on a tiny dose of Citalopram. The leaflet says that it takes a few weeks to kick in, and I'd say that was true for the depression, but it hit my anxiety levels within a couple of days. Maybe I have particularly susceptible neurons, maybe it was a placebo effect, I don't know. And nor do I care. It was a profound relief. I have heard people describe SSRIs as giving them 'breathing space' and that's exactly what it felt like: breathing space, thinking space, sleeping space. Nothing goes away, but you can look at it from a slight distance, with a bit of perspective, from more than one angle. I feel insanely (or maybe sanely) grateful for that space. One of the things I have found most interesting is that I am still having the same textbook anxiety dreams that I have always had - cars with no brakes, losing my passport in a foreign country, accidentally killing people etc - but (still in my dream) *these things are not bothering me*. I just get on and deal with them. It's extraordinary. And it makes waking up a far nicer experience too.

So we get to early November, and I'm not freaking out, and this is very good news. I had a couple of weeks off work while I was dealing with the Citalopram side effects, and a couple more weeks of short days (aka getting to have afternoon naps). I'm eating, I'm sleeping, I'm exercising. But I'm still as flat as a pancake. People keep asking me when I'm leaving NGO X (I don't know - to some extent this is up to me, and I can't decide) and what I'm going to do next (I don't know - this is entirely up to me, and I can't think about it) and how M is (we don't know - and this is largely unknowable). I went back to the doctors for a review.

This GP was the absolute bollocks. I told him my sorry saga and he listened, and asked good questions, and was generally both super-empathetic and super-confidence-inspiring. I'm still feeling pretty depressed, I said. Maybe I should take a slightly higher dose for a while, do you think that would be worth a try? Yes, he said, I think from what you've said it would really just give you that lift. So I left with a new prescription. That was on a Monday.

I work on Tuesdays, and I went into the office and thought, right, time to tidy up my desktop. I was closing Chrome tabs and I saw a job advert that someone had sent me a couple of weeks earlier, saying 'you should look at this, it's a very cool job and I think it would be a really good fit for you' ... and I'd immediately discounted it (though not closed the tab, interestingly) as it was a) full time, b) London-based and c) would have required me to feel that I was someone you might want to work with. I looked at the closing date. It was midnight on that day.

And it *was* a cool job, and it *did* feel like a good fit, and maybe I *was* starting to feel like I might be someone you might want to work with, one day, maybe. So I banged out an application letter in three hours flat, got M to read it, and sent it off before I could tell myself it was a terrible idea.

Two days later, they invited me to London for an interview the following week, and I went. I was still feeling a little like Suzanne Vega's Neighborhood Girl - looking out at people from the back of my mind - but I prepared hard (thanks to an interview preparation course that NGO X offers people who are getting made redundant - I had to do it in a flat rush but it was really helpful) and met up with my friend E for coffee beforehand, which made me feel more like a real human. And it was a friendly interview, there was nothing to be scared of. And I found I had things to say. By the time I left a little hopeful part of me had woken up, but I was a bit worried about that, hope can be a scary thing.

When I got the invite for the second interview, I knew that I really wanted the job, and I knew that I had all of the things they were looking for, but I still wasn't quite in the place where I thought that they might want to give it to me. The brutal thing about depression is you literally stop seeing the point of yourself. I hadn't gone quite far enough down the track that I couldn't see that this was a thing that was happening, rather than being completely sunk in it, but it was still a battle to try and imagine myself past it, rather than paint a 'well I used to be a person who brought energy and enthusiasm to things, those were the days, but I live in a hole now' kind of a picture. There's nothing original about this, I realise, but I have generally found enthusiasm pretty easy to access, and I felt its absence keenly. Also, I had a really shitty cold.

I went down to London the night before, and the lovely E met me again and we went for Thai food. I slept in a huge pile of duvets on her sofa bed, and in the morning she walked me to a little coffee shop by Harringay station, and then waited for the train to Old Street with me. It was pouring with rain, and the train was packed to the gills. I was the last person on, and could literally not move an inch for two stops. I fell out at the other end sweaty and snotty and a little bit tearful, and I thought, no, really, I should just go home now.

They have public toilets in Old Street, and I went into the Ladies, and sat in a cubicle for ten minutes, and gathered myself. I'd had a Lemsip before I left, and I squirted some Otrivine up my nose and held my head back till it cleared. I washed my face, put on some perfume (Jo Malone's Sea Salt and Wood Sage, which I call The Smell of a Simpler Time), had a drink of water, and thought right, get out there and do the thing.

I did the thing. I found my enthusiasm, and later that day, after I'd travelled home and was lying on the sofa listening to Radio 4 and drinking wine, my mobile rang and it was the recruiting manager offering me the job. I squealed with delight for the first time in a very long time, and I am squealing a little bit still. I haven't started yet (I do not technically finish with NGO X till the end of this month) but I am looking forward to it very much.

So there was a very good thing that happened at the end of a very bad year, and I am super-thankful for that. We had a low-key festive season, which we navigated successfully, we have entered Dry January, and I have accidentally joined a gym. There is more energy around, for sure, and there is more light.

And while I don't feel that I'm completely out of the woods - there is still uncertainty around M's prognosis (though he is feeling fine right now), and hey, no one could be unaffected by the geopolitical shitstorm that was 2018 - I have access to most of my usual resources, and I'm doing my best to deploy them effectively. They say that when the shit goes down, you find out who your friends are, and they are of course right. My friends have been amazing, some of them exceptionally so. Multiple little (and bigger) acts of love and generosity have made such a difference this year, especially at times when I have not been feeling very lovable. I've also been surprised by the power of the chance encounter - a few unplanned conversations have shifted whole chunks of my thinking. But they're not quite chance, are they. People must rate you a bit if they suggest things to you, you argue, and that can help you remember that you rate yourself.

I think we can largely thank millennials for changing the conversation about mental health - I don't know that I'd have sought help at the point where I did if that hadn't been a message that had been coming through loud and clear from some very articulate writers. It really doesn't seem to have the stigma that it once did, and that can only be a good thing. But I think I was also very lucky that I appear to have landed with something that worked pretty much straight off, first go, with nothing too bonkers in the side effects department. And I got to see fantastic doctors, and take some time off work, and spend many afternoons curled up in bed with my beloved and the Cat Who Doesn't Live Here, reading and snoozing and waiting for the clouds to lift. I wish we could all be so well cared for.

But me, I am, and I live to fight another year. And, I hope, to be there for other people like they were there for me.

joella

Leaving Oxford in 100 blog posts: 6. 28 Beaumont Street

When I first moved to Oxford, I registered at the Kennington Health Centre, which was fine. There was the one deeply embarrassing experience when I went for a smear test and I still had my diaphragm in, and then had to count on my fingers how many hours it was since I'd had sex to see if it was safe to take it out, but that was hardly their fault. But when my Significant Ex and I moved to Cowley Road, we switched to one of the practices based at the East Oxford Health Centre. And that wasn't so great.

I never had a problem with the GP I usually went to see, though I never warmed to her. She was always a bit rushed, a bit distracted, not the sort of person who has the time or the inclination to pick up on the things you're not saying -- but I was young, I was reasonably healthy, and it didn't matter that much. But there was another GP at the same practice, the one my Significant Ex went to see about his mystery abdominal pain, who was an arrogant arse. 'It's an ulcer,' he was told, and sent away with a giant bottle of Gaviscon which made no difference whatsoever. The pains came more frequently, bent him over double and took the light out of his eyes. You don't want to see anyone in that kind of pain, and you certainly don't want a GP who says 'well, you clearly think you know better than me, so what do *you* think it is?'.

In the end, his mum took him to A&E, and they diagnosed acute gall bladder inflammation. Which is rare in young men, but HAD, in fact, been picked up by his previous GP, at the Kennington Health Centre, who unfortunately sent the referral letter to number 127 Our Road instead of number 227 Our Road just before we moved, and the people at number 127 hadn't sent it back. So he missed the appointment, then he moved GPs, and the new one did not deign to investigate that closely. Three months later he had his gall bladder removed -- they would have taken it out there and then, but it was so inflamed by that point it would probably have exploded.

I wrote a letter of complaint, but I was young, and I was reasonably healthy, and I never sent it. I wish I had. But both of us left that practice as fast as we could. We joined 28 Beaumont Street, on the recommendation of a friend, who said 'I think you'd like Dr F'.

I did like Dr F, and I still do. In fact I reckon moving to 28 Beaumont Street is one of the healthiest decisions I've ever made in my life. Dr F is the doctor I see most often. She has a certain brusqueness, but mixed in with that is a great deal of experience, especially in women's health issues, and a great deal of humanity. She's a qualified homeopath as well as a GP -- I had a homeopathic consultation with her once about 10 years ago, after a laparoscopy revealed there was nothing specifically wrong with my patently sub-optimal urino-genital system, so there was nothing specific that Western medicine could offer apart from 'keep taking the codeine, love' or putting me back on the Pill. She prescribed sepia. I can't say it fixed me (and I do basically think that homeopathy is bunk) but it did get me thinking about my menstrual cycle and its effect on me in a much more holistic way, which in turn meant things did get better.

Over the last 15 years or so she's also referred me to a knee clinic for an MRI scan on my dodgy knee (not much to be done), a podiatrist for my dodgy feet (the main cause of the dodgy knee - they made me some orthotics which I usually remember to wear when walking any distance), a breast clinic for ultrasound and a lump biopsy (turned out to be benign), a dermatology clinic for a strange mole on my foot (they took it off but that turned out to be benign as well), an endoscopy clinic for my digestive issues (congenitally sluggish, but no intervention deemed necessary), an eye clinic for a scar on my eyeball that was picked up by the optician (turns out I have a scar on my eyeball), and most recently for a pelvic ultrasound to have another look at that sub-optimal female area (still a bit shit but nothing really bad going on, so back to a review of 'other options'). Plus the odd course of antibiotics to deal with UTIs, sinus infections and the like.

This all makes me sound like a raving hypochondriac, but we're talking about a decade and a half here. The main point is that I think if over that time there'd been anything really wrong with me, a) I'd have gone to talk to her about it, and b) she'd have listened, and got a second opinion and/or more information if she deemed it necessary. I know that's what GPs are *supposed* to do, but that's not to say it always happens*. There are some skills you've either got or you haven't, and she has. I think she rocks. She's a Girton woman, I think that might be part of it.

Many of her colleagues are very fine too. The nurses can take a smear test almost as fast as you can say 'Ow!', and have blood out of you before you've even noticed. During my latest review of other options, Dr F gave me a very clear explanation of the reasons why 40-something hormone levels can wreak havoc on a person's life, and suggested I talk to Dr M, who knows a lot about progestogen management. Dr M rang me while I was waiting for a train at Radley, and we had a detailed conversation about coils and implants and progestogen-only pills which prompted M, sitting on the bench next to me, to seek more knowledge of such things himself. I don't think he'd realised there was so much to it, just that for mysterious reasons I was spending more time than usual in a sobbing heap.

Cerazette is what she recommended for starters -- ten weeks in and I've been hardly sobbing at all.

But extra-special mention must go to Dr S, who I went to see in the Dark Days in the New Building, when I was (basically) in a total state. I came down with a sore throat and tried to make an appointment with Dr F. She wasn't available, so I opted for Dr S instead. He called me in and I started telling him about my sore throat and how I thought it was tonsilitis, and I probably needed some antibiotics. Hmm, he said, and how are things at home? Well, all right, I said, bit stressful (these were dark days for M as well, all his children had fallen out with him and he was very upset). And how are things at work, he said. And I found myself telling him all about it.

Jo, he said, you don't need antibiotics, you need sleep. And he wrote me a prescription for Temazepam and signed me off for a week, which, looking back, is one of the single best things anyone's ever done for me. A month later I went back and said 'these Temazepam are BRILLIANT, can I have some more?' and he said well, they are rather addictive, so you can have one more lot, but that's it. That was over five years ago and I still have a few of them left. I use them for very special occasions when I need to wake up into a benign world.

And that, I think, is what I love about 28 Beaumont Street. They hear the things you aren't telling them. I'm not a great one for league tables, but I did check out their score in the NHS Quality And Outcomes Framework. Generally on a par or just above the average results for the PCT, and generally a little above the England average, which, knowing Oxford as I do, is just about what I'd expect. But their Patient Experience results are 99.7% -- 14% above the PCT average, and 27% above the England average. Which is basically about can you see the doctor you want when you want to, and do you get enough time with them. If you can say yes to these things, you're doing something right.

I can see that once we've moved, travelling over 200 miles to see my GP isn't going to be feasible, and they probably wouldn't let me stay on the books even if I wanted to. But on the grounds that you're nowhere without your health, I will miss that practice more than I care to acknowledge.

joella

*I once had to get the morning after pill on a Saturday, and the GP I went to see took my blood pressure and wrote the prescription on his doorstep. The GP I had in Cambridge tried to put every female student who went to see her on the Pill (presumably so her Saturday mornings would be uninterrupted).

Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got till it's gone

I've just been out on my own, for the first time in nearly a fortnight. Only to the Co-op, and only because I'd run out of wine. M would have gone if I'd asked him to*, but he's not drinking at the moment, and it didn't seem right. 

So I took off my slippers and put my trainers on, and limped slowly down the road in the clocks-gone-back drizzle, sniffing the air like a dog and obstructing the hordes clattering down behind me on their way out to tick another box on their student experience checklist. 

It still hurts to walk. In a 'you probably shouldn't be doing this' sort of way. I have a stitched up wound with various non stitched up bits opening up off it. If it was on my head or my arm or pretty much anywhere except the side of my foot, I think it would be better now, but despite doing *almost nothing* for what feels like forever, keeping it clean, keeping it dry, adding Sterastrips to give the stitches a helping hand, every day it still bleeds a little. 

I have evolved two modes of moving around. The first involves just putting weight on the ball of my foot. You can move quicker that way, but your leg soon cramps up. The second involves putting weight on ball, heel and instep. This can only be done very slowly... any attempt at speed makes you feel like the whole thing might bust open at any moment. Which it might. 

You do of course, at least if you're me, spend much of this time thinking about people who have to walk a long way with wounded feet, and what fucking agony that must be. Or people who can't walk at all. 

My whole life is geared around having functioning feet, I just never realised. And while I usually find the termtime walk to the Co-op fairly oppressive, what with the non-compliant rubbish that the council will never collect, the badly parked Minis that I want to run a key down, the shitty dance music emanating from every window, and the clouds of posh girl perfume that just don't mask the stale smoke and the ghd-singed hairspray... tonight it felt kind of liberating. Look at me! I can walk to the shop! Buy a bottle of Soave and some houmous! Walk home again and put my foot up! I don't care that it's raining! I don't care that I'm in your way, but I will of course let you past if you ask! No, I don't need a bag! Yes, I have a Co-op membership card! I am part of society!  

The odds are that my foot will be completely fine at some point soon. I hope I will remember to celebrate full foot functionality, and also to get a little less annoyed by shit that doesn't actually matter. 

joella

*In fact, M has been a gold-standard boyfriend throughout this whole experience. Except for coming home with No Added Sugar Ribena, but that was an honest mistake.

Hurty foot update

This isn't a very good 'after' photo: there are still strips covering the stitches and there was a bit of bleeding which I haven't been able to wash off yet. 

But let's just say it hurts. Not so much when I'm not doing anything, but a lot if I try and walk on it. They did warn me. I did say 'yes of course I'll take it easy'. I didn't quite realise I wouldn't have any choice. 

Which made it all the weirder when, nine hours after I can back from hospital, when I was lying on the sofa full of wine, painkillers and macaroni cheese, the doorbell rang in an urgent kind of way. It was the students from next door -- the side we like -- asking if we knew how to turn their water off as their toilet had exploded and the bathroom was flooding. So I grabbed a walking pole and hobbled round. We got the water off but the toilet didn't have an isolator. 

So M followed with my tools, and I ended up breaking all the rules of plumbing: don't do it when you're a bit pissed, don't do it in your favourite trousers, don't do it when you can't walk. Nothing too drastic - just cut the pipe to the toilet and stuck a cap end on it so they could put their water back on, but they couldn't believe their luck, and I woke up the next morning in a codeine haze thinking 'did that really happen?' 

Guess it did. And, as the nurse said, Moley's in a pot now. I wanted to ask how she knew I'd called her Moley, but I guess it's a pretty common name. 

joella

Feet and millimetres and clay and spirits.

I've called her Moley Cyrus. She's 8mm long, and she's coming off tomorrow. 

I won't be digging for a bit, so I made the most of the glorious weather today, and went down to the allotment to plough the fields and scatter (aka pull up a lot of bolted lettuce and weeds, and plant out some spring cabbages that likely won't survive our current plague of whitefly). 

The sun was going down, and it was just me and J from over the way left on the site. "Don't overdo it," he said, as he loaded up his bicycle. 

One of the many, many reasons I love my allotment is because I get to hang out with people like J, men who are either retired or very partially employed, who practically live on their plot (they have sheds, and quite likely *have* spent the night there on occasion), whose wives probably despair of them in a well-at-least-I-know-where-he-is-and-I've-not-had-to-buy-an-onion-since-1983 sort of way, and who are generous with both their advice and their surplus apples. 

I'm fine, I said. Beautiful day, isnt' it? 

It is, he said. I just spent the last half hour drinking whisky in the sun and doing nothing. 

I'd guessed whisky was one of the many things J keeps in his capacious bike basket. He has that look, and occasionally that smell, about him. But he has asparagus beds, and has just single-handedly built his own polytunnel. I aspire. 

He checked I had a key on me, in a delightful slightly pissed courteous way, and took his leave. I stayed there a while longer, pulling out the bad stuff and leaving in the good. 

Listening to: See that my grave is kept clean - Diamanda Galas

joella

Free at the point of use

I have this brown mark on my foot. It just kind of arrived a couple of years ago. My mother said I was getting old. I *am* getting old.

Over the summer, my friend N came to stay. A few years ago she went into hospital Up North (where she lives) to have a mole removed from one of her eyebrows. You can see the scar if you know where to look, but they did a lovely job. More importantly, while it turned out to be a Bad Mole, she has since been given the all clear.

She spotted the mark on my foot when we were both curled up on the sofa watching TV and said 'has anyone looked at that?'. No, I said. 'Go to see your GP', she said.

So I booked an appointment via the EMIS system. I've been going to the same GP practice for over 10 years, and I think it's great. I got to see the doctor I always try to see - one of the partners, who is also a trained homeopath and the closest thing to a British bluestocking I can imagine. She had a student in with her, and they both looked at my foot. 'Need to refer that, I'm afraid,' she said, and filled in a form. It was ticked 'urgent', which alarmed me slightly. I took it downstairs and gave it to the receptionists.

A couple of days later I got a phonecall at work from the Dermatology department at the Churchill, who'd called me at home and got the number from M. She offered me a 9.30 appointment the following Tuesday. I said I *could* make that, but I was supposed to be in an all day meeting that day, but I wasn't working on the Friday? She said I could come at 9am on Friday instead. I said thanks. She said she'd send me a letter to confim but it might not arrive on time, but there was a map on the website. I said thanks. I took advantage of this. 

[NB The letter did arrive on time, but I didn't open it, which I'm quite glad about, as it told me I had an appointment at a Tumour Clinic and I should try not to worry.]

I turned up at the appointed hour, and was directed to Waiting Area 2, where five minutes later a doctor called me in and asked me some questions. Do you want to see my foot? I said. I want to see all your skin, she said. We went into an examining room, I went down to my bra and pants and she looked at all my various moles. Right, she said, we do need to get the consultant to look at that foot. There will be a short wait.

She handed me one of those hospital gowns with no back, and went back into the outer office. I put it on, then lay down on the examining couch to read my book. After a couple of minutes, I put my socks back on, as it was a little chilly. Five minutes later, she came back in. Are you ok? she said. The consultant is coming soon.

Five minutes after that, he burst through the door with a student in tow and bearing a special mole magnifier. I took my socks off and he had a good look. Then he talked about the ABCD of moles to the student and got her to have a look too. Colour was his main concern. Can I see? I said. It was a bit tricky because of the angle, but I could see that it might look basically brown, but is actually very splotchy.

How did you get here? he said. I got dropped off, I said. How are you getting home? he said. I'm going to walk, I said. Ah, he said. Not if we take this off now. Oh, I said.

Well, we don't have to do it today, he said. But I want that off in the next two weeks. Because of where it is, you won't be able to walk for a few days, and you'll have to take it very easy for a couple of weeks to make sure it heals properly.

Oh, I said. I'm supposed to be going to Brussels next week for work. Not if we take it off today, he said. Oh, I said. Is the week after next ok? I mean, is it dumb to wait?

It's fine, he said. Chances are it's not melanoma but not worth the risk of leaving it there. There's something not right about it.

OK, I said. Thanks.

So I got dressed, the first doctor took an MRSA swab from my nostril (I have no idea why), and gave me a green form and a white form, which I took back to reception.

The receptionist took the white one, and directed me down the hall to the surgery appointments office. The woman in there looked through her bookings. It looks full, she said, but I keep a few slots hidden for two-weekers like you. How about 1.30 on the 14th?

Great, I said. She gave me an appointment card and a leaflet about minor surgery, and I walked home via the public right of way across the golf course.

When I got home I opened the original letter they'd sent me, where it did say that they also treat private patients. One wonders what extra you'd get for the money.

And while the ultra-specialist part of my care so far has been delivered via a male consultant, who was brusque but not bossy, every other contact I've had has been with a woman. And they've all thought about how I might be feeling and what else might be going on in my life. 

So I have to say to Ms Death Panel Palin and her freakish ilk: if this is socialised medicine, you guys should Bring It On. 

joella