Tommy can you hear me? No, oh well then we should investigate you using evoked otoacoustic emission...

Geoff is back ALRIGHT, *synth*

Good morning, my pretties, I hope you have all been well, I sit here on hour 1 of this Friday's Pointlessly Long Gap Between Lectures Extravaganza (TM) and, though I should be learning about neonatal jaundice & gastrointestinal problems I am faaaar too lazy and feel a blog is the best way forward.

So what thrilling events have occurred since our last chat?

Well at the beginning of this week I had my first real interaction with kiddies, in what is called a 'Developmental Assessment Session'. What this involves, in reality, is sitting down with kids for 3 hours and playing with toys. At first this was reasonably scary

Me: But whyyyy have you handed me this Mr Potato Head husk, that lacks in all limbs and appendages?
18 month old child: *SCREAMS OF JOY*
Me: But but this serves me no useful purpose. I cannot calculate my mortgage repayments with this!
Child looks at me imploringly, waiting for me to do something with toy
Me: Do you not understand me, man? Can you not cogitate than use of such frivolous things is below my extreme intellect?

You know that bit from Jurassic Park where the previously cute dinosaur tilts it's head to one side, hisses and spits BURNING ACID into that fat guy's face? Well children do this manoeuvre too, only it's not acid it's tears, tears and screaming.

Child: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
All parents/doctors turn to look to see what, the f*ck, I have just done to this child and whether I should be sent to prison forever.
Me: Shitshitshitshitshitshitshit

At this point, as though 'Jesus' himself, and by Jesus I mean millions of years of evolution, had injected the thought into my brain i instinctively picked up the dead remnants of Mr Potato head and peered through one of the holes left behind by his severed limbs.

The child immediately perked up and started laughing. To the max.

The next 24-48 hours were spent with us taking it in turns to look through the holes in Mr Potato Head and mirth was had by all. Especially the parents, who all escaped to some kind of amusement park and got WASTED on vodka.

Probably.

This session made me realise how awesome fun children are when you just give up trying to think logically and do random things with random stuff. A particular Northerner in my group spent a good deal of time cooking a yellow plastic cup in an oven, for some reason, and had a whale of a time; this being said, cooking fake food in a non functioning oven is likely the staple of northern entertainment when there is no coal around (and, these days, there never is so) the fun may have had little to do with the child.

The next day I was timetabled to go to 'Special School'. Now for those of you who were EVER a schoolchild you will know that the word 'special' must always be pronounced with ones tongue firmly embedded under their bottom lip and then followed up with some extremely un-PC grunting noises. This is the way it has always and shall forever be, at least until they think up another word for 'Special' people.

Political correctness in the naming of children who are, let us say, less mentally on the ball than they might otherwise be, is a particular bug-bear of mine. This stems from when we had a GEM 'Multidisciplinary Learning Day' where we were forced at gun point to attend and the nursing students (who were neither smoking hot, dressed in bikinis, or 18 years old as had been advertised to us) were given a casual suggestion that they might want to turn up. As a result: Sausagefest. Anyway at this day we had to sit through an hour long lecture on what the right words to use are. We were told that as each term came along, it gradually got used in a derogatory sense - making out that having 'learning difficulties' (as it should be called, apparently) was a bad thing.

NEWS FLASH: Having an IQ below 50 IS A BAD THING! Under no circumstances is it a good thing!

So Mental Retard is out (even though that scientifically describes the condition; as their mental development is slowed, or retarded), as is Mental Disability, as is Learning Disability. The new term, as I mentioned above, is Learning Difficulties. The plural is important here because if you have a Learning DifficultY then you just have something like dyslexia, or AIDS or whatever. If you have Learning DifficulTIES then you are much more severely handicapped. Though, you can't use the word handicapped either because that implies that people should be pitied.

NOTE: If I am ever in a car accident and lose my ability to function at a highish level. PLEASE DO PITY ME. IT WILL SUCK, I WILL BE VERY ANNOYED ABOUT IT.

Now my real anger towards this (that you may have noticed) stems from the fact that one of the lecturers, who i was inclined to believe had a few learning difficulties of her own, kept using the following phrase: 'Now this girl/boy had severe and MULTIPLE learning difficulties'. With huge emphasis on the multiple. The issue here is that DIFFICULTIES IS PLURAL, BY DEFINITION YOU HAVE TO HAVE MULTIPLE LEARNING DIFFICULTIES.

I may not have got across quite how annoying that was there so you doubtless think i'm insane, but I care not.

I'd also like to point out that I have huge admiration for everyone who works with these children and for the children themselves, who have been dealt rather a shady set of cards in life and deserve the best treatment possible. What annoys me is the airy fairy types who spend all their days thinking of the nicest way to describe the people and spend no time at all helping them in a useful way.

I digress.

So the school. Firstly I was thwarted by Miss Satnav who decided to take me via Milan and the Hanging Gardens Of Babylon before delivering me at the school (just round the corner from the hospital I go to every day and know exactly how to get to much more quickly). What's that, you say? Use a frikking map you moron? Well shhh!

The school had just been rebuilt with a government grant and was hyper wyper sniper fancy, it had been thoughtfully designed so that noone could get lost; e.g. it was in a big circle, had wide corridors for wheelcairs, had colour coded areas so that people who couldn't read could find where they needed to be and was generally top notch.

Nice work there, Labour, sorry to hear the Chavs who read the Sun won't be supporting you anymore for some arbitrary reason, but they'll be laughing on the other side of their burberry wearing faces when the Connies shut down all public funding for anything, including their precious benefits. That said, they don't turn up to vote anyway, so it probably won't make any difference.

I was soon ushered off to THE OTHER SIDE OF THE UNIVERSE by a bus from the 1830s that ran on steam, to go swimming. It has been a long time since I went to the public swimming baths and all I could generally remember was the fact you went in healthy, at some point found a random used plaster attached to your face and came out with varuccas a gogo. This may well still turn out to be the case from this encounter but what I'd missed in my memories was the joy of swimming and, furthermore, the joy of swimming with kids who aren't all that great at swimming (at this school, 'kids' go up to the age of 21).

Why joys? Because when you get success their faces light up like Lewis Barlow in a rehearsal break and there is much clapping and smiling. Sadly the clapping usually causes the kids to begin to drown and floats have to be swiftly administered to avoid death by pneumonia. On the way back from swimming an extremely cute boy cuddled up next to me on the bus and fell asleep fiddling with my watch.

My watch is now broken.

The afternoon was spent helping the kids eat dinner and then attending a French lesson. Sadly, my French was worse than theirs, despite them being unable to recall the meaning of 'au revoir', mere, pere, frere, soere or really anything else ending with 're' (which, in French, is EVERYTHING). I then helped the make bookmarks and then f*cked the hell off home 40 minutes early because Matt, the other medical student with me, had swanned in at 9:30 (I was there from 8:30) and spent the morning, so far as I can tell, chatting up the teachers with great success.

Pffft, just because he's attractive, hmph.

On Wednesday I was with The Health Visitor that, if she'd been a cybernetic robot from the future, would be an excellent premise for a film. Sadly she was not so the day was mainly spent with my face up Mr Potato Head's backside amusing children while she weighed their newborn sibling. I did notice, in my travels, that Postman Pat has made quite the come back. He was reasonably popular back in Nineteen Aught Six when I was a lad, but nowerdays he's bloody everywhere. One kid even had a Postman Pat massive doll thing, that wore a helmet with headset microphone and actually talked. He looked like Neo from the Matrix he was that cool.

Sorry kids but, in reality, the Post Office are a TOTAL LOAD OF GASH and can only be relied upon to go on strike when you'd really rather they didn't.

And that's all I have to say really, except that as of tomorrow we shall be in full swing for Tommy at the Nottingham Arts Theatre, Tickets are on-sale now (probably). It's a show about a boy who becomes deaf dumb and blind, (though he's not REALLY deaf dumb and blind, he is just unresponsive to auditory or visual stimuli and doesn't speak) whose f*ckup parents take him to a drug dealer, a car mechanic, the oracle, David Hasslehoff and a variety of other people before seeing a real doctor. In the meantime he gets raped by just about everyone in his family and then becomes amazing at pin ball. He then gains the ability to see hear and talk (he is freed from his 'strange vibration land', yes that's right, The Who, keep on smoking those drugs, they're clearly good for you) and gains god-like status due to his pin ball skills.

HE PLAYS PINBALL PEOPLE, GET A FRIKKING LIFE!

*cough*

Anyway, the script is terrible and the music is reasonably terrible but a lot of people put a lot of work into it and, most importantly, Hywel is going to be playing and it will ROCK YOUR FRIKKING SOCKS OFF. Furthermore, Graeme Crawford, an extremely talented singer and actor, is playing one of the lead roles so he is worth seeing too.