31st October 2000

Mornings are sacred to me; the moment when I open my eyes and gaze out the window is sacrosanct. Provided there's clear blue skies and sunlight in the air - which, surprisingly, there usually is in London. It gets cloudy sometime around 8.40 am when it's time for me to get out of the house. On the rare occasions when it's cloudy and pissing down, the day feels somehow defiled. Wrong. Not right.

Today dawned beautifully - in contrast to yesterday, which seems so far away now.

Yesterday, someone spat in my eye. She was about seventeen (oh she was only seventeen...) and came up to me while I was getting money out of a machine, in broad daylight, on a busy main street. She wanted spare change. My knee jerk response, of course, was to say sorry, I don't have any, and turn away. Living in London for four years does that to a guy. She begged and pleaded, and in a moment of insanity, I reasoned that the 1.50 I had in my wallet, which I had been planning on using for a sandwich en-route to lecture wasn't really going to happen, since I was so late already. So I gave her the 1.50 and started to run for the wonderful (not) things awaiting me in the obs and gobs department. (that's obs and gynae, for the uninitiated, which is the firm I'm on now) She followed me. And said, I have a baby, and he needs food. I thought sure, sure. Heard this one before. It must have shown on my face, she shoved the money back at me and said please take this back and come with me to the supermarket and I'll buy the food in front of you. I hesitated, and told her frankly, I'm very late, I need to run now. She did a little line about her baby having asthma. I told her to bring him to hospital. She said he was hungry, and that she'd tried social services and hospital. I told her not to be silly, the hospital wouldn't turn her away, I worked there. She said they would. I decided this was going nowhere and went on running. She ran with me, pleading all the way for a tenner. I told her that was too much for me, I was a student, and that I'd give her a fiver if I had one, but a tenner was just beyond me. Go find someone else, from ULU or something. She said she'd tried ULU, oh please out of the kindness of your heart, I'll pray for you. I thought err? Why would she pray for me for helping her? If anything, we should be praying for people like her. Was she really Christian? Were they just words of desperation? I asked her frankly what she would do with 10 quid worth of baby food, which was about 20 bottles. She said she needed nappies too. I told her I'd already given her 1.50 which was a start; she said she couldn't do anything with 1.50. We reached the doors of the hospital, and she said look, are you going to help me or not. I paused, and looked her in the eye, and said, no. She spat in my eye and ran away.

Typically, the thoughts that started racing through my (medical student) mind were HIV exposure, HIV exposure. Young teenaged girl, possibly (?) a mother with an unwanted child. HIV exposure. I sat through the next lecture uneasily, and jumped up once the lecture had ended to ask the lecturer whether she thought antiretrovirals were warrented. She said she was just a gynaecologist but she figured I'd get far more amniotic fluid in my eye before the end of the firm, so don't be silly, just go wash out your eye. That wasn't very reassurring. I phoned home later that night, and my dad said the risks were minimal, don't worry. That worked for a while, till I asked a friend to ask her flatmate, a casualty officer about it. The cas officer said they wouldn't bother giving me antiretrovirals anyway since the risk was so minimal. I hate risks, minimal or not. That coming from someone off his rocker and not exactly a rational creature anymore - but when the medical risks involve you, or someone close at hand, things get very different - and ugly indeed.

So today's all bright and sunny, well rather it is now. It clouded over on my way to work, and on my way home, but now that I'm home it's gone sunny - and when I leave for my lecture in 10 minutes, it will cloud over again, I know. Such fatalism? Not really. I love looking out my window and imagining how warm it must be outside - even though it's autumn now, and !%!"*(ing freezing.

Today : nothing happened. I had breakfast on the park en route to the lecture, and arrived - spot on in time for the lecture, not fashionably 5 minutes late like I'd planned. Time is passing rather flexibly for me now ever since I broke my G shock. I'm now leading a wonderfully irresponsible watchless life. I then managed to spill coffee from my functionally-challenged paper cup (with hole) onto my white shirt, and so I'm back home now in another white shirt preparing to go back for class. Tonight I meet up with TH for dinner at a really expensive restaurant on the Thames, and I'm really looking forward to it - I'm living the high life now, I'm going up in the world! Not.

Someone left a very odd message on my answering machine the other day, in an australian accent. I thought it was either a mis-dialed number, or a particularly cruel joke. I guess I'll never know.

Beverley Craven's just done promising me she'll be home soon, and now Bryan Adams is asking me if I've ever really loved a woman? And frankly, I don't care and I don't know, but I do know that it's time to go for my lecture. (I don't care and I don't know - the difference between apathy and ignorance.)

Next post : an amusing anecdote on dopplegangers and plane crashes.

Adios, amigos.