Baby Hippopotamus

Don't Worry - 
 - it will make sense in a bit.  Hopefully.  
     Today your humble hack sought a little definition for the ague that has befallen him, which consists of a loss of balance, rather than the voices in my head you were probably expecting.  Now, I know what you're thinking: "Oh good Lord aloft, seven hundred words of excruciating detail on a middle-aged man's health.  Shoot me now."
     Yes yes yes, people take it as a given that the world wants to hear their woes, and so do I, except this shall hopefully be amusing rather that grim, and if isn't intrinsically amusing, you can always derive a smug sense of schadenfreude from it.
     So.  Step One was to attend a Walk-In Centre, situated within Boots in the Manchester Arndale.  Conrad took some time accommodating the idea that you simply walk in, fill out a form and a doctor will see you.
     "There has to be a catch," I muttered to myself, getting suspicious looks from the other patients, who worried that this man hearing voices in his head was sitting near them.
     Step Two involved baffling the doctor, who then referred me to Manchester Royal Infirmary.  Off I went.

Reception

     Of course I had to donate a small amount of blood, which was quite the worst part of the day as I am, by mine own admission, a massive coward.  Then it was hang around waiting.
     Typically, of a day that did not go entirely as planned, I could not jot down any items of inspiration that popped into my head, because in my panicked morning flight from The Mansion I neglected to pick up my notebook.  

The item in question.  Note the notes.

     I need not have rushed, the 24 was 10 minutes late.  But I aced the Sudoku, thanks for asking.
     Step Three involved baffling another doctor, then a specialist.  After confirming that the issue was not voices in the head, I got a prescription for some tongue-twister and a possible diagnosis of the splendidly-named "Labyrinthitis".  This compresses about 5 hours of waiting.  I did come prepared and made inroads on "Guadalcanal Diary", and this preparedness impressed the specialist.
     One minor point is that one cannot consume alcohol with these tablets, so it looks like I shall be having a dry March.  Art?

     Currently I am in my Chair Of Sickness, with an attendant.  Art?

Edna, looking moody

     Our resident Wunderhund is especially happy to be my friend, especially if I happen to have food.
     "I say,"  she told me yesterday.  "I'd be willing to sacrifice both time and effort to help you in your edible endeavours, Conrad.  Let it never be said that I was remiss in offering - oh it's all gone."  Then so was she.

SLAM Bang
Last night I came across one of the best graphics for the SLAM "Pluto" that I have yet seen.  You may remember me banging on about this monstrous engine of execution, but I shall recap, just in case.
     It was a giant cruise-missile with a payload of sixteen fusion-bomb warheads, which is scary enough.  What made it scarier was the direct nuclear ramjet engine, which sucked in air, heated and then ejected it.  Ejected it full of radioactive particles.  Oh, I should have added "unshielded" to the engine description, because it emitted lethal radiation - why bother to shield it when there's no crew?

     Those 3 tubular objects are rockets used to boost this thing to ramjet-capable height, because you really, really don't want this thing operating anywhere over friendly territory.

"Guadalcanal Diary" By Richard Tregaskis
The one good thing about being stuck in a waiting room all day was being able to tackle this work, and get to grips with it.  War correspondent Tregaskis went ashore with the Marines on Guadalcanal and stuck around for the battles afterwards, sharing the deprivation and danger.  He was extremely lucky not to have been killed, when a sniper targeted him; he was carrying binoculars and had probably been mistaken for an officer.  He experienced being bombed and shelled on many occasions, and endured an unpleasant bout of gastro-enteritis.  It's interesting to note the differences between the book and the film, the book being a great deal gorier in parts.

Richard, back in the day

     One especially gruesome detail that Richard felt like sharing was the aftermath of a tank attack on a Japanese-held patch of jungle.  One tank had targeted an enemy machine-gun team; the gun was squashed flat after the tank drove over it, just like the five hapless gunners themselves.

"Baby Hippopotamus"
I nearly forgot.  To test for slurring of speech, and possibly to divert those voices in my head, Doctor Hulse asked me to recite the words above, as well as "British Constitution", which rolled loud and proud from my tongue.  No slurring there.
     No, we here in the Allotment of Eden do not have a written Constitution, thank you for noticing.  We get along just peachy without it, thanks again, and we frankly regard things like the South Canadian Constitution with a great deal of suspicion, it being all new-fangled and shizzle.

Dangerously recent!