Vitruvian Man

Because I am curious and will try (almost) anything once, I spent today inside two MRI scanners, the first for 30 minutes while it looked at what's going on inside my torso and the second for 20 minutes scanning my brain. I also had a low-dose-x-ray bone-density scan and donated some blood and urine samples. Over the next days, weeks and maybe years, experts will pore over this data trying to draw conclusions but I won't see them. This process is part of my becoming, 16 years ago, one of half a million volunteers for UK Biobank's longitudinal medical research and one of 15 people in a medical assessment centre outside Reading today. They have my DNA, they have my permission to access my medical records and they have my blessing.

Once I'd changed out of the scrubs I'd been chilly in for four hours (the building was behaving as if external temperatures were the same as last week) I sat at a computer doing a long life-stye questionnaire then spent another forty minutes doing cognitive and memory tests, set quite deliberately for when the participants were tired! 

I left attached to a small heart monitor which I will wear for the next fortnight then, since I was next door to Reading's out-of-town IKEA, I had a quick scamper through to remind myself that I can ignore expensive lighting and fittings as recommended by architects.

I'd arranged with Tivoli to meet up in Reading centre this evening for a night on the tiles. Haha. Tivoli knows a lot more than I do about MRI scans and she forgave me my fatigue. Instead, we had a wander round some of the places she has discovered in Reading and found a few more while we were looking for somewhere we were happy to eat - an introduction for both of us to varieties of Indian street food. 

I'm astonished that having lived not far from Reading for almost 30 years, I know so little of it. (Mind you, the bits I used to know have all been built over.)

The main is my take on Reading's ubiquitous cranes reflected in Banksy's take on Oscar Wilde's imprisonment in Reading Gaol and the extra, taken just after Tivoli's last bus home had left and just before mine arrived, is what some of the cranes are up to.