A Tale of Two Hospitals and Forced Fingers Rude

What a strange day - or is it just that I've become so set in my ways that any deviation counts as "strange"? As any reader of this journal will know, Thursday morning is supermarket morning, before breakfast, but today that had to go by the board as my long-awaited appointment with Dermatology was too early for me to do anything other than have breakfast and go for the ferry. Then it was up the two steep bits of road, up, up onto the moor behind Gourock to Inverclyde Royal Hospital, or IRH. 

It always strikes me, on every occasion when I've gone there, that the IRH building resembles nothing so much as the Borg ship in StarTrek. It sits up there in a slight hollow, so that the view even from the upper floors isn't what it should be, and on a winter's night the wind whistles round it as if it were on the edge of the world. (I've spent a week there in February, many years ago now, on one of the very highest floors.) Today I was seeing a Dermatology Consultant about the excrescence on my arm about which I was so worried until, around the end of February, it fell off; you lot were among the chorus of exhortations just to keep the appointment so I was showing him a pale purple, hardly-raised bump. So, to report: the consultant, whom I've met before, peered closely at the pink blob, looked at the not-very-good image I got the GP to send him (and praised me for making him do this thing!), pronounced it benign, and gave it a name: keratoacanthoma*. We had a jolly chat about our both having studied Latin and a shared love of Italy; I apologised for having wasted his time; he said that I hadn't and that it had anyway been very enjoyable, and out I came. And on my way back to the car I was hailed by two old friends who live in the East and so were totally unexpected, and had good catch-up with them. 

We had some coffee in the car, then headed off down the very steep hills with the fantastic views of the Clyde (the two smaller pictures) and were home in time to do very little before we were out again, this time to the hospital in Dunoon, just 3 minutes' drive from home, for our 6th Covid vaccinations. This was a very sociable event, given that we had to wait our turn in a former ward now lined with easy chairs which filled up with people from our past - a former colleague whom neither of us recognised, a neighbour, friends from church - so that the banter was considerable and the nurse thought maybe they should set up a tea stall...

And then, hours late, we went to Morrison's and dashed round because it felt so busy and because I wanted to get it over before I felt any after-effects of the jag. It was another hour or so before my arm began to hurt, and a bit longer before I began to feel a bit rotten, but I had time to make soup and stew some forced rhubarb as mentioned in the pretentious title of this blip. 

Fairly obvious literary references, but a virtual Mars bar to the first person to place them ...

*Look it up - there are scores of horrid pictures.