Cambridge was grey and drizzly when we arrived. We found our booking.com apartment easily enough, very handy to everything but in a singularly charmless part of town. The apartment is small but functional, part of an old building that’s been subdivided into four. Two of the apartments are called Darwin and Newtown, but on our floor are Gilmour (ours) and Holcroft, which ring no bells for me at all. So, either unrelated names of no one famous in particular, or I’m horribly ignorant of two unsung heroes of science. Apologies to you both if the latter (although actually Google knows no better than I do).
We found a little place that does pizzas, pots and pints for dinner. There was a table of people next to us playing cards who looked awkward enough to be PHD students. Simon reported that they didn’t have the white wine that I’d wanted to order, but apparently there was a French wine by the glass called Shelby that was meant to be quite nice. Feeling embarrassed to be so ignorant about French wines, i went up to the bar myself to see what they had. Turns out the bartender, clearly more familiar with beer than wine, had meant that there was a chablis available. It was a very pleasant evening, but when I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night feeling horribly nauseated, i wasn’t looking forward to my mackerel fillets making a reappearance. Luckily it responded to a buccastem and I slept the rest of the night.
Jet lag managed to get me up in a timely manner this morning. I spent an hour over breakfast working on getting my blog up and running. Progress = zero, but I did meet a lovely man on the support desk called Edwin who was very sorry not to be able to be of more help. Out of his hands, unfortunately. Eventually i figured the admin staff at the hospital might be out of bed, and i made my way to Addenbrookes. Wherever the charming part of Cambridge is, it isn’t out in that direction, i can tell you. Lots of impressive cycle lanes though ( a very cycle friendly place, Cambridge. We’ve hired bikes for our three weeks here for the princely sum of 38 pounds each.) Addenbrookes is a hideous rabbit warren like most hospitals, but i eventually found my way to medical staffing where i found that although all my paperwork was in perfect order, unfortunately both the anaesthetists I had contacted about working here (including the well known Dr M Allford) were away on holiday for at least a week. Once my photo id was sorted, we found a very nice but rather bemused duty anaesthetist type person to deliver me to the neuro theatres where i spent the rest of the day. I worked with a lovely man, a very experienced but rather cynical anaesthetist called Derek. We both decided that the concept of “observer” was very poorly defined, which is how i found myself intubating a very pleasant retired teacher with rather poor teeth (no worse afterwards than before, luckily). Pleading jet lag, i left well before their scheduled finish time of 6:30. Nap, dinner, and then back again tomorrow.
Another pleasant day on Tuesday – a transphenoidal list (can you believe I ever wrote that sentence? Must be a first for me). Unfortunately, my skin has become horribly dry and flaky. I blame the theatre air conditioning. Best i take a couple of days away from work for the sake of my health.
(Editors note: apologies for the flurry of posts; i accumulated quite a backlog while trying to get the whole blog business sorted)