Summer Breeze.

After my agonies on Wednesday, today I suffered on multiple fronts: after an early and trivial breakfast of black tea and toast (with a mere scraping of butter and jam) I was on starvation until the endoscopy. A friend, very generously drove Mrs TD and myself to the hospital where we waited, and waited until I was given an introductory talk about the horrible things they were going to do to me; then we waited, and waited a bit more.  Eventually, I was called into the surgical room where they spent 10 minutes doing the horrible things - as previously promised - followed by a de-briefing that went along the lines of, "What are you doing here wasting our time, there's nothing wrong with you?" Though they were really quite polite about it. This was followed by a questionnaire of the type, "On a scale of one to ten, how unpleasant was it?"

We went out for a meal tonight, I couldn't face cooking; after eighteen hours of "nil by mouth," but for that piece of toast and cup of tea, I was able to do full justice to an expensive three course dinner at our very good local Italian joint. Roast duck always was a favourite: Sis always reminds me of the occasion when we had roast duck for Christmas; the only problem was that I discovered, when I started to prepare the meal at midnight just before going to bed, that said duck was still sitting at the supermarket checkout. I forget what we ate that year, but I'm sure that there was something in the freezer.

The one source of entertainment provided in the waiting room was a picture called "Summer Breeze" by Dorothy Black. Reminiscent of "Mariana," by Millais; known in our family as, "Oh, My Poor Back."