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...

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 ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

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