Waiting

Another good day yesterday, and today has started not too shabbily either.
I am sitting in my lounge, iPad on my lap, Led Zeppelin playing, appropriately on my Zeppelin dock. Best of all, for the first time on an ordinary working day,  in the 23 years since we moved in to this house a fire is burning in our large rustic grate.
Am I belatedly learning that special things don't have to be kept for special occasion, that they can make the ordinary and the mundane special?
Bloody hell, philosophy on a Thursday morning. Don't worry it won't become a habit. We all know where it can lead: POETRY, and there is very seldom any excuse for maudlin, half prepared poetry from middle aged men with too much time on their hands.
Anyway YESTERDAY.
I suspect yesterday will prove my easiest encounter with the NHS this winter. A CT scan. This asked no more of me than to lie still for a few minutes occasionally holding my breath while a motorised bed passed me through a big ring of , I'm not quite sure what? X-rays I guess.
I am told that pretty, or not so pretty, pictures of 1000 slices of vintage Peddie are now available for radiologists and oncologists to study. A plan will emerge, and I rather hope soon.
I have a confession too.
I am not very good at checking my mail. Business bills and cheques come in but are quite happy to rest on the table till I am ready to deal with them.
I was not yet prepared to deal with regular correspondence connected with an adventure in tumour science. When an appointment came in asking me to be in Dunfermline yesterday I filed it then relaxed. What I hadn't been quite prepared for was the chance that I might get a revised appointment for a day later and 20 miles closer.
When we got to Dunfermline there was a blank look when they searched for my appointment. But you know what they did? They fixed it. Quickly and efficiently. They even managed to do it 15 minutes earlier than my original time.
Black mark to Peddie, gold star to NHS!
And we have another appointment. Ominously entitled 'US guided biopsy neck'. I confess that this gave me a wee shiver of apprehension and a vision from a bunker in Texas as the American military launched a drone strike on my tender neck.
Apparently not. It is an ultrasound guided biopsy of something lurking in my neck. But I guess you wise and well informed people all knew that instantly.
Last night wasn't too shabby either. The Andrew Melville Hall Christmas dinner. With me on the top table (did I mention I married well).
Good food, generous supplies of wine and good company. Above all a lovely atmosphere as a couple of hundred students relaxed and enjoyed themselves for a few hours in that short gap between their course work ending and the exams beginning.
St Andrews University attracts the brightest and the best but even they will find it much harder to chart for themselves a rewarding route through life than those of us who were educated in the 1970s.
Judging by the chat and the buzz last night these kids will do OK.