Hello? Is there anybody in there?

Jenwis had an MRI scan on his head today - results have not yet come back, so I can't say for definite if a brain was detected.

The hospital sent me a nice letter explaining about not wearing clothing with metal bits in etc. I eventually found a pair of trousers with only plastic buttons for fastening, swapped regular grundies for my leather ones with the metal studs and arrived feeling slightly smug. That didn't last long.

After paying a King's ransom for the car park (which was sheet ice... don't get me started) I wandered into the appropriate department where any smugness rapidly evaporated. I'd forgotten how depressing these places are. Everyone in the waiting rooms in the X-Ray department looked at you as you walked past with that kind of sad look that hopes forlornly that you might be about to tell them they're fine, and it's nothing to worry about. It was either that, or they couldn't believe my wooly hat and scarf combo.

After signing in and filling in a form that asked all the same questions I'd already been asked, I sat in a microscopic waiting room with 6 month old copies of Heat magazine (Did you know Michael Jackson had died?!) with an elderly gentleman, who after shooing his wife away, said to me "They do fuss, don't they?". We then did the very British thing of not talking to each other and trying to avoid eye contact. Not easy in a room smaller than a double bed, by the way.

Finally a nice nurse came and told me to remove all my clothes except my underwear. Luckily, before I got started, she did point me to some changing cubicles. So much for the list of what to wear. I then had to put on a hospital gown. They're one-size fails to fit all, but with Giant Haystacks in mind just in case. Ever tried tying the strings behind your back? After successfully making myself look like a circus big top and shoving all my clothes in a locker (including my glasses - squinty squint!) I was show into the scanner room, where HAL from 2001 eyed me up tetchily. The highly efficient technician rapidly explained it all to me, and before I knew it, I was lying on a tray with a frame around my bonce, a panic button in my hand and my legs raised up on a cushion to make me "comfortable". I think I know what going to the gynaecologist now looks like.

The tray then slid me inside the machine. Here's a handy hint if you ever have to go through this... CLOSE YOUR EYES. It's bloody terrifying. Did I mention the ear defenders? It's very noisy, so I had those on too. I got a 15 second blast of Radio 2, then silence (thanks for that. It really helped.) They were right though, it is noisy. It's a bit like a 10 year old trying to play assorted musical instrument by repeatedly bashing or strumming. After having my eyes closed for the first five minutes I finally opened them. Mistake. It looks like the tube is about and inch from your face. You have a teensy mirror above you angled so you can see out of the tube. Unfortunately, I could just make out the top of the door frame, and that was it.

I began pondering a kind of Day Of The Triffids scenario where everyone suddenly went blind or vanished or something and how I might get out of the tube. Tip number 2. Don't do that. It really doesn't help.

15 minutes later, it was over. I was extracted, still felt like a prat and wondered if my underpants were on show whilst the technician explained that the results would be sent to my consultant.

I retrieved my stuff, got dressed and walked back out through the sad-eyed people in wheelchairs and got a Chino to cheer myself up from the nice lady in the WRVS shop (£1.30 - bargain) who, for some reason, felt the need to tell me that she didn't normally work there. H&S regs dictate that you must put the lid on the cup before leaving the counter. I knew there was too much froth, but attempted it anyway. Amazing how far milk foam can squirt vertically out of the drinking hole in the top.

Anyway. The photo probably helps to explain why they need to investigate the inside of my head...

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

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