Arthur's Medical Records continued

Infectious diseases: myxematosis - probably caused by continual wearing of lucky rabbit's foot. Akin to digitalis caused by wearing of lucky fox brush.

Hot flushes: picked up the Fiery Jack instead of his Anusol Cream.
Was heard to mutter something about tears and eyes and a game of soldiers. Now says he understands why all the toilet paper issued by the Army bears the rubric "Now wash your hands, please" as well as the broad arrows and crest that distinguish the order in which said Military Service should be performed. it was Great Uncle Arthur who first recommended putting the toilet rolls into the 'fridge to alleviate the effects of attacks of the infamous Red Hot Tropical Trots.

Paranoia - general: Now he's started worrying about the number of pages his notes fill... but it's rather unlikely that his notes would affect the vast total that must be floating around the plastic wire world inside the grey box under the table.
Complains of claustrophobia; have tried to explain that we use shorter words now, and hardly any dependent clauses. Information Technology somehow seems to require longer and more involved linguistic structures than we have been used to; as the words lengthen and the verbs expand to match one begins/commences to wonder/speculate/ ponder/ruminate about possible sources of confusion as the (article, definite) channels, passageways, portals or entrances get more and more clogged and thrombosed with the verbiage (intellectual, of course) that now passes for intelligent comment and even conversation.
It was the cult of "Instant Opinion" on the Box that started the rot; most of said rot being very dry except where the interviewee is puddled; and as far as either the interviewer or the interviewee make sense at all, they might as well be half-cut (drunk, inebriated, elephant's trunk, brahms, et caeterea, ad infinitum nauseamque). (Also see comments on Bamberger-Marie disease).

Health ed.- drugs of addiction - sent to see GP for advice on drugs - recently convictedof growing cannabis among his triffids and venus fly-traps, and charged by the RSPCA with cruelty to plants, insects and the environment in general. Released on bail, this no longer being a capital charge.

Pure mathematician: says he can do it all in his head and doesn't need an electronificated counting-frame cum digitalised waste-paper bin to work out sums and that the only reason we need it now is that all the metrics go in three figures like 1000g and 1000mm and you can't have cm (officially) and that life was much much easier for those like us who can't count beyond twenty when we used nothing but shillings, pence, tons, cwt, two hands and two feet to count fingers and toes, see. The only reason we decimalised the money, he says, is that the bankers wouldn't take their shoes and socks off to count up to twenty. Says the computer is a cross between an abacus, a wad of paper and a dustbin - all doing copperplate-pen clerks out of a job not to mention printers of ledgers with three columns for the money and graph-paper with twelve divisions to the inch.
Quotes Napoleon (who also didn't like the metre and millimetre) when cross with the eternally ever-diminishing number of grammes in a pot of raspberry jam; NB gramMES, to remind us the French thought the whole thing up to make up for losing the Meridian to Greenwich. And you can't call the 1p a penny - it's really a farthing, and worth less than the farthing was and if you took 5p as a real penny (1d) of the proper size and then had twelve of these real pennies to the shilling and twenty of these to the pound, then the pound would be what it was worth in Marks in the fifties and things would seem much more reasonable, and you wouldn't need calculators and computers any more because all money sums could be done in the head just like what they was years ago. So there.
They couldn't decimalise in the years before the Great War because all the insurance-policies were linked to the penny as were the tram-stops and you'd have to either increase the fares or decrease the distance between the stages if you brought in a 5-mil for the penny (d) and Big Business wouldn't replace the penny with a 4-mil because they'd lose money... Plus ca change, so to speak... White man speak with forked tongue and greased palm.
#Humerus - caused primarily by cracking unfunny jokes. Complains that the chalet at Butlin's Holiday Camp (where he went last year) wasn't big enough to swing a cat in. Which is a rather silly remark to make when you consider that they don't allow pets in the chalets anyway. And I've never met a cat which liked going on the swings or even on the banana slide. Wants to know "where's it all going to end?"; answer (a) probably in a Black Hole, (b) never, and (c) "why?"

Night blindness due to failure to provide Norweb Electricity Company with prescribed remuneration. Sudden visual loss, possibly due to pet rat eating television licence reminder, followed almost immediately by sudden hearing loss caused by lack of required financial stimulus to telephone company.

Rectal irritation Foreign body in GU tract: pepper pot, one, silver-topped, labelled "A present from Margate" and half-filled with well-ground highly aromatic black pepper, with a hint of mint and black cherry tobacco.
War injury - is how Arthur refers to this problem, preferring not to expose himself to ridicule and shame by admitting he has actually been to Margate. Says it is not true he holds the EKII (with oak leaves) awarded him by Kaiser Bill for shooting down one of our own British carrier pigeons with his air rifle.

O/E - taste sensation: remarks that he prefers the flavour of the old-fashioned well-matured Christmas Pudding Mother used to get at Jones & Higgins on the corner of Peckham High Street & Rye Lane, - especially those spiced with little round flat silvery bits mixed in with the nuts, berries (well-soaked in brandy), raisins and generally mixed-up peel.

Christmas diseases
Amnesia symptom - cannot associate the signatures on the Xmas cards with any person he has ever known. Reassured that this is perfectly normal.
Panic attack - brought on by the imminent season of jollies and happies and general Midwinter Festival Celebrations. Says he preferred the noise of the V1s to that of his fellow-humans at Yuletide even though they too never bothered to apologise for disturbing your sleep while you were on fire-watch on Jones & Higgins roof.
Carditis NOS - brought on by excess of robins, holly and being told to be jolly, merry or whatever, in so-called rhyming couplets. Has decided that next year he will send out cards saying "Happy Birthday, Mithras" and "Merry Politically Correct Midwinter Celebration" on cards sufficiently neutral in design as to give no offence to no-one nowhere nohow.
Homesickness - Sound of Music, White Christmas, Friday 13th Part XIII, Snow White, The Exorcist, Pinocchio, Apocalypse Now - usual happy Christmas film fare on the box.

Memory disturbance - keeps harking back to his childhood, and saying how much happier it was when people actually listened to him instead of ignoring him and confining him to a tall tin box under a tatty old table. Just think, he said the other day - when I die, will anyone notice? I think back, he said, to what Grandad Joe said about his grandfather dying. Said they sat him up in his coffin, fixed a bottle of Guinness in his hand, lit all the candles, and then danced round the coffin singing:
Why did yer die,
Why did yer die,
Silly old bugger
Why did yer die?

That was Grandad Joe's idea of a proper Wake - no, says Arthur, I've no idea what the tune was - but it must have been a very cheerful one from the sound of things ...
(End of extracts)