Those slimy mung bean sprouts.

The profession generally regards patient confidentiality as inviolable. In fact, my sieve, no, make that colander like memory for names usually ensures my own patients' confidentiality.

Sometimes, though, it’s very tempting to break the rules, especially when an episode involves what can only be described as unbelievably mind-boggling stupidity. So, Mr Whoever-you-were, (we’ll call you “Jack”) prepare to be blogged.

Jack, aged about 65 years, was playing bachelor for a bit. Mrs Jack had gone overseas on a (I would say) well-earned ‘holiday with the girls’: a cruise to Thailand, to be precise.

I first met Jack on a medical ward at the very moment he was vomiting over my intern, who, at only three days into his first job, had not yet developed adequate foreign-bodily-fluid-projectile dodging skills (as in, ‘use the force, Luke’).

[You know, medicine in a tropical climate must be the only occupation in the world where one can expect to see real shit hitting a real fan on a semi-regular basis. In-coming!!! But I digress.]

Jack had been left to fend for himself. The mates, hearing of Mrs Jack’s departure, had turned up fairly swiftly and had eaten, over a few good footy matches on the telly and a slab of ice cold stubbies, most of the pre-prepared meals that Mrs Jack had left in the freezer for her husband to eat over the ten days she would be away.

Jack was crook. He disembarked at both ends for three days. Finally, the exodus settled and I was able to send him home. I said to him before he left, “Jack, sometimes people who have food-poisoning can think of something they ate that might have been suspicious”, letting my voice drift up hopefully at the end of the sentence.

“Well,” he said, “after the boys left, all I could find to eat was a plastic pot of mung bean sprouts that had been in the fridge for a while. They were a bit slimy at the bottom.”

Not typical, I thought, but possible. So, off Jack went home. The next day, there he was, back again, sick as a dog.

“Jack! What happened?” I asked, mentally listing a Hugh Laurie-style differential of obscure diagnoses I may have missed.

“Well, you know those slimy mung bean sprouts I told you about?”

“Yes, Jack.”

“Well, I know you said they might have caused my food poisoning but I wasn’t sure, so I ate the rest of them last night to see.”

Traffic jam poem No 2. (aka 'back of the used envelope verse' or 'occasional insomnia rhyme')

I really love my flanny,
I really, really do,
It keeps me warm and cozy,
In a nice big plaid that's blue.

My friends all say it's daggy,
I say to them, says who,
When they tell me, take it off,
They haven't got a clue.

The lumberjacks are fine,
The footy fans are too,
For extra wintry weather,
Only blue plaid flannies do.

In the cold old days of autumn,
When May winds chill me through,
I really love my flanny,
I really, really do.

(Especially for Shado)

Friday the fourteenth

Main foyer, Natural History Museum, London.

For some reason or other, I have been thinking about England a lot lately. It might be because I've been mulling over some plans for a Euro-centric holiday or perhaps because recently, the Beeb has been throwing us a life-line from the drivel that is Australian commercial television with shows like Spooks, Bleak House, Dr Who (at a pinch) and of course, the Judge.

Indeed, England is always a nice thought (apart from the instantly impoverishing exchange rate). As much as I love multi-culturalism and the whole Pacific Rim thing, when your ancestors all come from Stoke-on-Trent and towns in Lancashire, it's nice to imagine a good old wallow in one's own ethnicity from time to time.

On 14th May, I was especially glad because the Natural History Museum in London was ordered to release some human remains that had been held in the museum for years against the wishes of the indigenous people of Tasmania. The Aboriginal remains had been held in the name of science instead of being returned to Tasmania for proper leaf smoking and burial.

Now, I know that, personally, I would need a Millennium Falcon to get within even parsecs of understanding the complexities of the indigenous culture of this country.

(Being the thirtieth anniversary of the beginning of Star Wars, I think bloggers should be given free reign to include as many Jedi references as they please.)

Even so, I do know enough to realise that for indigenous people, not having ones ancestors' remains in the right place at the right time with the right ceremonies for burial is an absolutely intolerable state of affairs. It would have been good if the museum staff could have come to this conclusion themselves instead of having to be ordered by a judge to change their stance.

The argument was that the remains kept at the N.H.M. could still yield much about the history of indigenous Australians through further scientific examination. However, there are many different ways to approach the truth and science is only just one of those ways. It might be a pretty good way, sometimes, but it is a narrow minded and an extremely arrogant position to take, to think it is the only or the most important way. The return of the remains was more than overdue.

(If I was feeling really narky, I would add that the 2001 Robbie Coltrane movie, "On the Nose", was a seriously insensitive and un-funny farce on this topic - shame on David Caffrey.)

Now I can return to the museum comfortably. So, why would I want to go back to the N.H.M? Well, the original botanical artworks of Australian native flora by Sir Joseph Banks (Capt. James Cook's botanist on the Endeavour in 1770) stenciled around the architrave of the main foyer are always worth a look up.

There's also a terrific meteorite collection, which is better than Smithsonian and the Alice Springs collections for my money.

I'm no geologist but the fact that meteorites were formed in a place so far a way that most people think of it as being somewhere near infinity and that infinity is a place where man's science and man's imagination and God might connect, make them hugely exciting to contemplate.

Most importantly, we cannot forget that the N.H.M. was the place, there on the steps beside the big dinosaur skeleton, where Lieutenant James Dempsey, finally, declared his true and undying love for Sergeant Harriet Makepeace (in the eponymous late eighties television series), on his knees no less!

Not arrested, apprehended.

As the popular British broadcaster, Steve Wright might say, this was a fine piece of muppetry and he'd be right.

The night was both dark and stormy. (Well, okay, it was inner-city Brisbane in October 2000 and it had been raining a bit). I was living and working in a seaside town about four hours drive north of Brisbane but that particular weekend I'd happily driven back to attend a small bon voyage party for a good friend and colleague. She had just taken a scholarship to study epilepsy at the neurology department, the Mayo clinic, Minnesota. (Not a bad achievement for a girl from Bris). We dined at an Indian resto on Park Road, Milton and asked for the bill around midnight. I said my goodbyes and walked back to my car, which I had left parked in a side street. So far so good.

I pulled out into the street and drove up to the T-junction at Park Road. The lights were red. There were two lanes. A non-descript white sedan was in the left lane, indicating left. I was in the right hand lane. Suddenly, I remembered I wasn’t driving home to where I used to live in Brisbane but to another friend’s place, where I had arranged to stay the night. I quietly slipped out of my lane into the left lane behind the white sedan. At this point, everything was still okay.

On the green signal, we both turned left onto Park Road and down to the next intersection at Milton Road. This is where my muppetry began. Since I had last been there, the intersection had changed with a new sign and I couldn't turn right as I had planned. There was nothing for it but to continue behind the white sedan, heading away from my friend’s flat.

By this time it was raining again. The asphalt was glistening under the street lights and visibility by my standards (the astigmatismatic myope's) and I imagine by Brisbane standards in general, was poor. The lines on the roads were barely visible. The sedan and I reached the next major intersection, a complex five-ways. Well, what was a zimble to do? I thought, 'I'm not sure where I am going but the white sedan seems to know where it is going, so, I'll follow it,' and I did, across the intersection.

I know this is tedious but I promise there is a reason for my terminal long windedness, all of it being part of a feeble attempt to ameliorate my muppetry, as you will see.

I realised this was now getting beyond a joke. I was still going in entirely the wrong direction. I turned in a side street and started back out into the traffic, heading for my friend's flat. Suddenly, behind me, in the rear vision mirror were two very large bright lights, very close. 'What a turkey!' I thought to myself, 'high beam in the city and this close?' As though my thoughts were read, the lights were dimmed and I thought nothing more of it. It was an uneventful trip to the street outside my friend's flat by the river at Hill End.

As I pulled in, to park across the road from the flat, suddenly, the lights were there again, right behind me. At this point, several expletives slipped past my lips, 'Sh*t-sh*t-sh*t' to be exact. Whoever was in the car had followed me all the way across town and it probably wasn't to ask for directions!

I considered my options. One was to stay in the car, lock the doors and call the police. Now, had I chosen this option 'A', my muppetry would have magnified a hundred-fold (see below). Fortunately, as it was, I chose what I called option 'B', which was to get out of the car and run like the clappers up to my friend's third floor flat.

I jumped from the car, my purse and keys in hand, slammed the door and started pelting across the road. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of two very fit-looking young men wearing jeans, tee-shirts and runners getting out of a non-descript white sedan and hurrying after me across the road. The expletives worsened. "F**k!" I said, sotto voce.

"Stop! Federal Police!" one of them bellowed.

It's at that sort of moment in life that you feel like your chest is about to cave in, never to draw another breath. I stopped and turned. Although my thoughts at this point were somewhat incoherent, I did understand that if I kept running, things could get worse and possibly involve the firing of guns. The two men were still moving forwards.

I started to edge away from them and one of the men said, "No, you have to stop, we're the police, I'm going to show you my ID."

At that point, fight or flight was giving way to pure fright, along with a strong desire to heave or collapse or simultaneously do both.

The IDs came out and sure enough, the two men were Detective Sergeant Smith and Detective Constable Jones of the A.F.P.

One said, "You can't stand there, in the middle of the road. Come back to the car".

So I did, thinking by this stage that I probably wasn't about to die. The questions from the Sergeant came thick and fast. Whilst the Constable took my drivers licence back to his radio or computer or whatever communications device the A.F.P. have in their car these days, I did my best to answer. Where was I living? Why was I in Brisbane? Whose car was it? (It was a car from the hospital pool). Why was I driving it? What was I doing at Milton? Who was I meeting? And so on and so forth.

Finally, the D.C. returned and handed me my licence.

"Well, that's fine, Miss," he said, "My partner and I are working in this area in collaboration with the drug squad and the CIB and we wanted to know why you were following us."

At that point, the full extent of my muppetry hit me like a Mack truck. I did the only face saving thing a zimble could do and burst into tears.

"I'm terribly sorry," I said shakily, "I always blubber when I get a fright."

The D.C. gave a wry smile and said, "Don't worry Miss, so does the Serg."

After that, they laughed and could not have been kinder or more gentlemanly if they tried. They asked if they could walk me up to my friend's flat and explain it all to her. I said no, thinking that I had wasted enough of their valuable time.

As I said, complete and utter muppetry.

Sisters

I've really been enjoying Jem Shaw's blog about his trip with his brother, Martin and friend, Adrian. The trio descend not once but three times into deepest darkest France to repatriate (de-patriate?) to England, a very nice looking, little, yellow aeroplane.

Some of Jem's comments remind me of the vicissitudes of being the eldest sibling, in my case, to a sister, five years my younger. [Don't tell her I said that because according to said sibling, she is "twenty-nine" and I am "twenty-nine and some months" (cough)].

Of course the main thing, with respect to the relationship, is that if your little sister is a barrister with an LLM hons, then, no matter what, you never, ever, win an argument, ever. However, Naughtiness (not, said sibling's real name) has over the years caused her older sister some not insubstantial degree of consternation.

Like any brave young Aussie, she followed in the footsteps of the great Northern adventurer, Clive James, by moving to London for two and a half years. She took the usual slow, upwardly mobile course of living in a cheap B&B in Earls Court, then a bedsit in Wembley and then, when a brick came through the window, a share house in Battersea.

It was not the 'falling towards England' that was the problem but the crackly reverse-charge international phone calls landing like scud missiles at un-godly hours of the morning. The calls tended to come in three main types.

The most worrying type always started with "Dude, I'm sick," in a teary, high-pitched tone. Most people have probably experienced similar calls but how many of them are expected to put FRACP level medical knowledge into action at a distance of 16000 km at two in the morning?

You start listening, intently, for subtle signs of delirium, dyspnoea and sometimes dysentery and then you stop listening and start trying to remember if you have ever heard anybody mention the English emergency number: not 911, that's American, not 000, that's here, not 666, it wouldn't be that. Perhaps the international operator would help?

The next type of call always started I-just-wanted-to-let-someone-know-where
-I-was-going-but-please-don't-tell-Mum-and-Dad." This was followed by, for example, the taking down of a complex series of Aeroflot flight numbers, a shared and semi-accurate recital of the Cyrillic alphabet and the rote learning of the address and telephone number of an obscure Moscow youth hostel.

The third type was certainly less vexing but just as perplexing. On answering the phone, one would hear the cacophony of a pub on quiz night and then the following: "Dude, what is the name of the body of water between China and Taiwan?" um, Formosa Strait, "Ta Dude, see ya!" or, "Dude, what was the name of the base in Hawaii Five-0?" um, Iolani Palace, "Are you sure?" um, Yes. You get the picture.

Still, where would I be without someone to tilt their head to one side, examine mine as though it were an aubergine and say with some gentle exasperation, "You didn't put any product in your hair today, did you?"

A Buggy House (3.7.06)

Huntsman spider (non-dessicated).

Some dwellings are just plain buggy. For no good reason certain houses are frequented by far more than their fair share of cockies, spiders and ants. No amount of pest control can defend a "buggy house." It's the law of the shag pile in there.

I once lived in a buggy house. My sister was staying there too and she agreed, it was a buggy house. The worst invaders were the huntsman spiders. These spiders, as big as your hand, would appear on the walls, waiting and watching. Once disturbed they would run and jump at and cling to anything that moved, like superheroes of the bug world.

One day, a super-sized huntsman ventured inside. My sister and I, being good citizens of the world, tried to shoosh it outside with a broom and when that failed, we attempted to catch it in an old tea-towel and then shake it outside into the garden.

Our efforts were in vain. When we reached a consensus that this particular spider had done its dash, I turned environmentally unfriendly, put my Buddhist tendencies aside and reached for the spider spray.

Having received a lethal dose of spray, the spider disappeared. We searched and searched with not a sign of the spider to be found. Oh well, we thought, it will turn up with the next vacuuming. It didn't.

Some three or four months later, my sister and I ventured to O'Reilly's Guest House in the rainforest. It was just after breakfast and we were preparing to go on a day-long walk. My sister already had her walking boots on and was cleaning her teeth in the bathroom. I was sitting on the floor of our room: left sock on, left boot on, right sock on and then it happened!

As I slid on my right boot, my heel crunched to the sole. I immediately knew what it was and started convulsing with laughter. My sister came running, bemused by her sibling's sudden seizure. I couldn't speak. All I could do was tip the contents of my boot, one dessicated huntsman spider corpse, onto the carpet.

Three Women (3.5.06)

Victoria Foyt and Stephen Dillane in "Truth".

Recently, I've been pondering the thematic similarities of three works which, on the face of it, should have nothing to do with each other. The first is "Deja vu", the Henry Jaglom movie, recently released on DVD. The second is "Casablanca", now also on DVD and the third, a novel titled "The Constant Image" is by the late New York author and historian Marcia Davenport.

"Deja Vu" caught my attention because of the delightful performances by Glynis Barber and Michael Brandon. In this story, Sean (Stephen Dillane) and Dana (Victoria Foyt) meet coincidentally at various times and places and see these coincidences as signs that they were meant to be together. Ultimately, they leave their respective partners, Claire (Glynis) and Alex (Michael) causing much pain. There are some other characters who waffle their way through the film but they are entirely inconsequential distractions.

In Casablanca, as everyone knows, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) leaves Richard (Humphry Bogart) standing on a rainy Paris railway station platform with the German army knocking at the door and the last train about to leave. He reluctantly departs while she returns to her husband, the brave underground leader, Victor. Ilsa and Richard meet again, presumably by chance, in a bar in Casablanca and have to try and work it all out.

Marcia Davenport writes of a wealthy American socialite divorcee, Harriet Piers. (Well, they always say write about what you know.) Harriet is invited by a friend to spend a winter in Milan. Once ensconced, she embarks on an affair with a young married Milanese businessman. At first she is confident that she won't get "in too deep" and will be able to leave Milan in the Spring without major consequence. (Yeh, right). The two fall deeply in love and the separation proves excruciatingly painful. That is until the businessman decides to leave his wife and two young children to follow Harriet to America.

Each of these three women protest that they were doing what their heart told them, that they were swept along by fate. Dana emotes that she does not know what to do with this feeling of de jevu (or more accurately, the feeling that she should be with her new lover rather than her fiance). This may make "Deja vu" one of the most self indulgent movies ever filmed. Ilsa argues that she still loves Rick with all her heart but did not have the courage to leave her husband in Paris or to tell Rick the truth. That conveniently changes when she and Victor are desparate to leave Casablanca and need Rick's assistance. Meanwhile, Harriet knows well what it is like to be the wife of an unfaithful husband (her ex having been a real cad) but does not see this as a valid reason to leave well enough alone.

Are these three women entitled to behave as they did? Does their perception of "true love" excuse what are essentially three base acts of betrayal? I don't think so. We all put up with circumstances that may not be ideal and should do so to protect others from pain. Whether they have insight or not, these women are self absorbed and cruel. Moreover, they have no patience and so the consequence of their infidelity is immediate, searing and unforgiveable.

Traffic jam poem No. 1 (aka Zimble-ku) (28.4.06)

Vengeful clods make
Idiots fall, shake and rest
Save their souls.

Westward tide
Washes away last shadows.
Witching hour.

First sea swim
Salt on sundrenched skin
Summer surf

Funny at first
Always adding alliteration
Many buckles!

Chocolate Surprise Cake (8.4.06)

The nicer side of Cow Bay, F.N.Q.

Once, whilst working at a Far North Queensland hospital, I met a very unfortunate man and an equally or perhaps even more unfortunate baker.

A middle aged man was asked by his wife to organize a nice iced chocolate cake for her demure bridge party which was to take place the following day. Dutifully, he drove to the local bakery and spoke with the baker who said, “No problem."

It just so happened that a bunch of ferals from Cow Bay had had the same idea: a nice chocolate cake. (Not a bridge party). They trucked into town, dreadlocks waving in the breeze, and went to the very same baker. Varying the pitch of their monosyllables as much as they could, they grunted what they wanted and again, the baker said, “No problem”. (Actually, you wouldn’t want to tell a bunch of ferals that there ‘was’ going to be a problem, even if you couldn't understand them.)

The next morning, the man stepped out into the steamy sunshine, got into his slightly muddy 1978 Ford Falcon 500 and drove to the bakery. It was at that precise moment that his difficulties began.

The baker had stepped out for a short time and so, on his arrival at the bakery, the man spoke to the baker's wife. She found two lovely looking, seemingly identical, iced chocolate cakes on the shelf, picked up the first and gave it to the man.

The Cow Bay ferals lurched into the bakery just as the man was leaving and collected what they expected to be their ‘very special’ iced chocolate cake.

The bridge party was a hit with the local ladies but the man, relegated to the kitchen to wash up the tea cups, felt a bit left out. Gradually, over the course of the morning, he consumed the entire huge remaining portion of the chocolate cake.

As the rubbers concluded and genteel gossip filled the living room, the man staggered in from the kitchen saying he didn't feel quite right. His wife, a sensible lady, suspected a stroke. With the help of some of the bridge players, about five of them, she drove the man to the hospital.

The baker was eventually contacted (the mobile phone connection along the crab pot path in the nearby mangrove swamp was not very good back then). He was able to confirm that the ferals’ chocolate cake, the 'very special' chocolate cake, the one containing the liberal quantity of hashish oil, had indeed been accidentally sent by his wife to the bridge party.

The man recovered to his normal state of excellent health with supportive care. The baker's wife has probably calmed down. The Cow Bay ferals almost certainly won't have calmed down and the state of well being of the baker remains unknown.

"Truth" (7.4.06)

Thea Gill as "Laura".

I was looking forward to this television movie. It had been some five years or so since Stephanie Zimbalist’s last tellymovie outing in “Malpractice”. However, there was a problem. After watching “Truth”, I wasn’t so much disappointed as puzzled. Why did anyone actually bother to make this half-baked murder mystery?

In essence, the plot sounds ok. Thea Gill plays Laura. (It’s a good thing TV heroines always have nice sounding names. It would be too bad if she were christened something bland such as Mavis or Hilda or Zimble like the rest of us.) Laura intended to become a journalist but instead has become a lightweight TV entertainment reporter.

Laura decides to put on the old 'professional journalist' hat to investigate the murder of her best college buddy Amelia Moore. Amelia was killed whilst investigating real estate fraud in regional Southern California.

It turns out that Meredith Beckerman (Zimbalist), the girls’ old college professor, was running Amelia and tries to do the same with Laura in order to take revenge on the rich evil family that destroyed her own career in journalism and that is now perpetrating the fraud.

Meredith continually pans Laura for not pursuing a "proper" career in journalism but in the end, Meredith sells her soul by trying to blackmail the baddies and is arrested in a sting arranged by none other than the supposedly hopeless Laura. (Come on now, we couldn’t have an American telly movie without a “the good hearted will always triumph” lesson could we?)

So far so good. The movie starts promisingly with very contemporary shots of LA but then things get weird. Throughout the film, the lighting gives a strange goldy-beige colour. It’s looks glary but no one is fussed with sunglasses.

Meredith, Laura and Christie (one of Meredith’s current college students) are playing at being “serious” journalists but parade around in summer skirts and low cut blouses as though they are going to meet for drinks afterwards at their local Mexican resto. (Thank goodness Zimbalist had the good sense to put on a cardigan.)

I could handle these minor production anomalies but it was the very strange characterisation that really had me beat. Take the Laura character for instance. Her motive seems to change as quickly as the weather. First she’s mourning the death of her friend who she felt was "like a sister" but hadn’t bothered to visit in years. Then she pals up with Meredith and we’re off on a road movie when we’re not cozying up with red wine and classical music. Then we’re on a pizza date with the investigating police officer and then, just when it couldn’t possibly get any weirder, we’re walking away from Amelia’s grave, hip to hip with the grieving widower.

Zimbalist’s performance also had me scratching my head, at least for a while. Normally Zimbalist plays her characters with a great deal of sympathy but not here. Meredith is consistently anxious, a bit loud and mostly unfriendly. What is going on, I thought. Then it became clear. Meredith’s line “I’ve been in a downwards spiral for a decade” explains the performance. Zimbalist salvages an otherwise mediocre and very odd movie.