I suppose I slept better than I have been doing recently.
It was a shame that I was plagued with rather vivid dreams, and waking up came
as something of a relief.
I made toast and peered into the Internet. It was still
there. One of the American work-based Facebook groups had a post about the
dangers of mouth-pipetting. In my line of work you use a pipette to suck up a
measured volume of body fluid to analyse it. The force to do the actual sucking
comes from a hand-held device these days, but back in the day the pipette was a
long glass tube. One end went in the body fluid, and the other end in your
mouth. And you’d (quite literally) suck it up. And if your attention was
distracted you’d get a mouthful of pee or blood.
But you could take away the taste by puffing on the
cigarette that you’d rested in the ash tray beside your microscope…
And this was why when I first started as an apprentice
blood tester in 1981 it was suggested that I seriously considered not being a
part of the pension scheme on account of the average blood tester dying at age
fifty-eight from something nasty they’d caught in the laboratory.
These days we have health and safety… at the moment.
Here in the UK we now have enforced national standards for
health and safety, testing procedures and all sorts of professional conduct.
But reading the work-based Facebook groups it is painfully clear that in other
parts of the world they just have a go and hope for the best. Mouth pipetting
is still a thing in some places… bear that in mind when there are calls to
close the NHS and replace it with something cheaper.
I munzed, failed at Wordle, and got ready for the off. Over
the last week I’ve been working a day on – day off sort of shift pattern.
Bearing in mind I’m only supposed to do two and a half days a week, I’m not
quite sure what is going on. But today was my second consecutive day off.
I drove round to the co-op where the normal people were all
standing about outside grumbling about how all the shelves in the place were
empty. They didn’t look that empty to me.
From there I drove up the motorway listening to the pundits
on the radio talking about a new initiative to get more people speaking
Welsh. Is this a good thing? I’m not convinced.
I drove up to Karl and Tracey’s. Tracey was busy today, but
Karl and I drove up to Biggin Hill. Some
time ago I solved a load of geo-puzzles in the area, and today we went to go
find the caches. I’d deliberately not taken the dogs, and I was right not to
have done so. The start of the walk was on busy roads, and some of the paths
were a tad narrow. And there were several horses in fields on the way.
As we walked we met two groups of very polite teenagers
doing Duke of Edinburgh hikes. We met them within ten minutes of each other,
and they were going in completely opposite directions. At least one group was
going the wrong way.
As we came to the end there was a strange little episode.
We came to the final hide. Karl went to one side of the road and I went to the
other. Karl found the geocache and two full canisters of petrol. I was on the
other side of the road and I found a brand- new battery-operated drill with a full
charge.
What was that all about?
Geocaching-wise the “Spitfire
Saunter” is a walk I can wholeheartedly recommend. Well-marked
footpaths and straightforward hides, we had a great day. We walked just over
nine miles (twenty thousand steps), and I was rather glad to see the car
at the end.
We came home. “er indoors TM” boiled
up pizza and garlic bread which we scoffed whilst watching “Race Across the
World”. They’ve got to India; it looked crowded…
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