There was no blog for the last couple of weeks as I was off sunning myself in the south of France. Eagle-eyed readers will be amused to know that I got royally bitten to pieces by mosquitoes. But enough of that.
I couldn’t get worked up about anything while bathed in the glorious sunshine and smell of lavender so I didn’t post a blog. I didn’t even buy a copy of the Daily Mail to annoy myself with. My holiday mood soon evaporated on my return. Not just because I had missed the announcement that Wills and Kate are finally officially engaged. Work.
Never mind the huge pile of post (credit card bills mostly) jamming the front door shut, I came home to a massive list of MRI’s to report. The problem of being self-employed, is that if you go on holiday for two weeks in one month, two months down the line you’re broke. The credit card bills looked at me even more accusingly. So on Sunday morning I got up at 7.45 - am, that is - possibly the earliest I have ever got up on a Sunday when I haven’t had to work or travel - and started on the personal admin stuff. Two hours, and six cups of silver tip white tea later, I had decimated the paperwork. Actually I hadn’t, it means reduce by 90% (I wonder how many tabloid journalists know that it was a Roman punishment, where soldiers were divided into groups of ten, and one lucky bugger got to kill nine of his comrades?) and I’d made a tiny dent in the pile.
I began to wonder whether my self-imposed ban on caffeine was wise. Everything I read about caffeine suggests that in moderation it does make you more productive, makes it easier to lose weight, and all manner of other fantastic health benefits. I peered grimly into my silver tip, very nearly four months caffeine-clean, was I going to crack? I left my bills (x5), French tax letters (x4), backlog of medico-legal cases (x3), things to return to Amazon (x1), list of people to ring (x7), photography mag (x1), knitting mag (x1), and I put the copy of Clinical Radiology straight in the bin - well, not straight, I got Troy to take the plastic jacket off it first so it could go in the recycling.
Then I started on the MRI scans. The more I reported and turned them blue in the list, the more a fresh yellow one would drop in to take their place. It was like playing Bejeweled, but far less compelling. I took a brief respite to buy sandwiches for the family Sunday lunch - bad, bad Mummy - and returned to the grindstone. Sixty MRI’s later, I emerged from the office/currently bedroom, blinking in the evening light, like a disorientated mole.
By 11.00 am today, Monday, I merely have one medico-legal case left to do, and have reported 13 MRI’s.
I have been home just over 36 hours, and already I need a holiday.
“I put the copy of Clinical Radiology straight in the bin.”
OK. That’s it. you’re on my list.
O - oh!!!
But I get free wool with the knitting mag.
Actually decimation was the other way round
“A unit selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (Sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing.”
I thought that was what i was taught at school. Serves me right for checking on Wikipedia. In which case decimation was exactly what had happened to my piles.