Tag Archives: waiting times

Day 187

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X-Ray Day.

It went surprisingly well. The taxi was prompt, the journey was quick, the driver was pleasant. I arrived early, was X-Rayed and left the department at 10.52, which was good when you consider my appointment time was 10.50. The journey home a re-run of the previous journey. I have some acidic observations but will save them for another post.

I had an inkling that something was going quite so well for Julia when I arrived home. She had left to walk down to the surgery before I left, and was still not home. I didn’t panic, as there is always a possibility she had taken a detour on the way, such as shopping or chatting to a friend. One of the advantages of being miserable and anti-social is that you don’t get delayed by people wanting to get involved in pointless social rituals. If it doesn’t involve biscuits, keep to yourself, is my view.

When she returned, a tale of woe unfolded. She arrived early, booked in and waited. And waited. After 40 minutes she was about to ask what was happening when the nurse appeared. It seems that someone had turned up and insisted that they had an appointment when there wasn’t one on the system. They were very insistent so the nurse took them through just to shut them up. It took 40 minutes to sort them out and made everyone else late.

One the face of it, it’s bad and it has just encouraged the patient to throw their weight about next time they don’t get their own way. On the other hand I recently had a case where they claimed there was no appointment on the system when I know I made it and they had it, because it had come up in conversation about something else.

Ah well, cosmic balance and all that.

Stirrings of Artistic Temperament

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I think I may be developing an artistic temperament. This is not good, as I am not an artist. I am a word mechanic and rely on calm and orderly conduct, plus a large vocabulary and a metaphorical bag of literary spanners – swapping words in and out and tightening things up as necessary. I don’t do art and I don’t do feelings.

I read through the submission guidelines of a magazine late last night and decided, despite previous decisions to the contrary, that I wasn’t going to submit. They just struck me as a bit sloppy and as I have a limited supply of poetry it seemed a waste to tie it up for three months or more when I could show it to people who would give me quicker responses (and allow me to resubmit it elsewhere).

I never seem to have enough good poetry to go round, so I can, to some extent, be selective. It’s not an approach that I want to extend, because I always feel the need to keep opportunities open, and it’s also borderline arrogance. I’m definitely not so good that I can afford to start acting like that.

However, I do remember from my business days that there are sales you don’t want to make, and sometimes you just need to walk away. In this case there are two other magazines that I can submit to. They are not necessarily quicker, but they are more professional and it is all laid out beforehand without any words like “we aim to”.  That’s a bit like saying “we often don’t”.

This attitude, of course, is partly due to my involvement with haiku and haibun – those magazines seem to be a bit quicker and more poet-centred in their approach. Many poetry magazines won’t give feedback, and say so in their submission guidelines, one editor even going as far as to say that if you want feedback you should go to a writers’ group. I can’t imagine anything worse than sitting in a room full of writers and having to read my work out. Even salad and exercise seem more attractive.

Rainbow – Spring Evening

The photograph is of a rainbow we saw tonight,. Julia go a shot with her phone which showed it as a double but I was just too late. Unfortunately I can’t download the photo she took so you will have to put up with mine.