The Lords of the Rings

The forces of darkness are closing in around me. It could be my fertile imagination or a case of paranoia brought on by the ridiculous amounts of painkillers I’m ingesting, but I swear I can feel the eye of Prime Minister Gordon Brown searching me out like Sauron in Lord of the Rings. What I wouldn’t give for a ring to slip on my finger to make me invisible right now.

The media attention that the blog has generated worldwide has been phenomenal but anonymity is a fragile commodity. The media doesn’t like people being anonymous. They choose whether you can be anonymous or not. I wonder how many of Rupert’s henchmen are lurking round hospital gates up and down the country attempting to get information on the whereabouts of Traction Man from doctors and nurses as they come and go on their shifts.

Frankly, I’m already getting odd looks from the nurses every time I get my laptop out and start typing. Taking a call for an interview with an Australian radio station at breakfast time wasn’t exactly the subtlest way of keeping a low profile either. I’ve donated some cakes and biscuits to the nurses’ rest room in the hope of buying their silence for a little while longer. Mind you, with nurses earning a pretty low salary for a bloody hard job, I think if I were them I’d be tempted to take thirty pieces of silver from Rupert Murdoch in order to reveal the whereabouts of Traction Man

So, for this reason I’m going to have to play it safe. That’s why I’m typing this entry from under my bed sheet. This is harder than you might imagine considering my left leg is strung up and immobile. With my head under the sheet I must look, to the casual observer, like a dog cleaning his private parts or a politician partaking in some sort of auto-erotic asphyxiation. But I can’t give up now. The battle against the gloop must continue and I must continue to write this blog.

It turns out that this hospital food scandal isn’t a peculiarly British phenomenon. I mean, we Brits are just brilliant at doing things badly but it would appear that many other countries are jockeying for the title of worst hospital food in the world. According to people commenting here on the blog there are some prime candidates eager to snatch our crown for this dubious accolade. Apparently Canada comes in fairly high up the slop scale along with some German and American hospitals. Australia has less chance of winning (and not just at cricket) because some of their hospitals have been known to serve fresh fruit, properly cooked vegetables and even meat that hasn’t been minced to within an inch of its life.

There’s certainly stiff competition but I think we Brits are definite Gold Medallists in the Cat Sick and Sludge category. Perhaps we should think about holding a Hospital Food Olympics. Why not in London, in 2012, the Home of Hospital Mush? Every four years the nations of the world could come together to see who could take gold, silver and bronze in the various hospital grub categories. Of course, we’ll need to think up some suitable categories so I’m depending on you, dear reader, to come up with some good ideas. So let’s start now, shall we?

Let the games commence!