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.