If it wasn’t for the state of modern medicine then I would be dead by now. And so would my wife. So, probably, would quite a number of people I know who still enjoy a fairly healthy time of it. We are all thankful that we live in an era where surgeons no longer amputate with a rusty saw and a bottle of strong alcohol or cover us in leeches. And while we still almost certainly know a small fraction of what is yet to be discovered we also know these are better times.

When it comes to our health we seem to wander into a twilight zone where we are willing to accept all kinds of humiliation and indignities that we would not dream of allowing at any other time. We will stand before men and women we have never before met, stripped naked, and let them probe our bodies in the most intimate of ways that in other circumstances could land people in a lot of trouble. We freely give our consent to such assaults without argument or rancour.

But somewhere in this zone between normality and surrender there are other aspects that have little to do with what is to be done to us yet we accept them all the same and like any uniform they reduce us to a common level. And in normal circumstances we would surely not comply. Take, for example, hospital garb.

A couple of days ago I found myself in hospital for a slice of bodily assault known as a ‘procedure’ which I am not going to elaborate on. Well… OK. It involved a small camera being inserted into an orifice all right? Yes – a delicate orifice. This involved a trip to a theatre – I know not why it has this name – for which I had to be suitably dressed.

First up the gown which ties at the back. Women, so adept at connecting hook and eye on their bra can probably tie a neat bow behind the middle of their back but men are just not used to it. If you are without help then the only recourse is to try and tie the knot before getting into the gown which generally results in not being able to get your arms through the holes. You end up with the gown tied in the one place – at the neck – letting your bum see daylight for all to see.

Then come the knickers (shown in the picture). These are one size fits all and are made of a sort of stretchy tissue paper and for something so seemingly fragile they grip the bits men have got with a fierce determination. But they cover the bum which was previously available for public scrutiny although the view is hardly an improvement.

The feet go into a slipper made of light foam. These slippers are not really foot shaped and have no conception of left and right but here’s the tricky bit – they stick to the floor. To be able to walk in them you need to develop a special hospital waddle where you pick each foot up as if wading through six inches of custard.

And the final indignity? Suitably attired with the waddle mastered, you have to walk through the hospital corridors to get to the theatre!

Oh no – sorry. I forgot the hat. It looked like a hat but of course I had it upside down. It was, in fact, a bowl and you know what that’s for. And where else but a hospital would you urinate into a cardboard bowl and, flushed with pride, hand it over to an attractive young lady with all the delicacy of offering her a bunch of flowers and asking her out on a date?

If you have visited The Depp Effect – the blog of my better half – then you will know that back in December she underwent a pretty nasty surgical operation on her shoulder from which she is still recovering. But, I have to say recovering, apparently, very well.

Today saw us visiting the physiotherapist once again who is no longer looked upon as just a sadistic torturer now that the pain is reducing and much mobility has returned. She showed him her progress in being able to raise her arm which looked to be in the region of about 110 degrees – up from around the 50 degrees he recorded two weeks back. And then he stuck needles in her.

I have never had acupuncture and have always been somewhat dubious about the whole idea. After all, these are needles and therefore sharp, pointy things which I always understood should stay on the outside of our bodies – bodies that do not, after all, require any extra holes. But I have to admit that I was rather stunned. Firstly I was stunned by the noticeable lack of ‘ouch’ as the needles were tapped in and stunned 15 tranquil minutes later when she again raised her arm and got real close to a full 180 degrees. No Ouches there either.

I offered to pick up some pins in B & Q so I could do this at home but for some reason she declined.

Anyway – all of this has nothing to do with pacemakers. On the big double door that one enters for the physiotherapy department is a big notice that says: “If you are fitted with a pacemaker do not enter or you will explode”. Well, OK, I made that last bit up but it was a dire warning all the same. What amused me was that both doors were open and pushed back a full 180 degrees to the wall. So if you were fitted with a pacemaker you would already be inside the room before you found out you shouldn’t be which possibly made that notice the last thing you would ever see.

You’ve got to laugh haven’t you?

I have discussed our refuse arrangements here at home before. We have one of those black wheelie’s for all of the rubbish and two of the green wheelie’s for all of the recyclables. This started when we had two teenagers living at home and we regularly filled all three bins on their two-week collection cycle. We really thought that when both boys left home, and just us two were left, one of the green bins would become redundant. This was, of course, wishful thinking. OK – we don’t always fill both to the brim but it is rare they don’t both get pushed outside.

It seems a complete obscenity to me that when we are being bombarded daily by the prophets of doom over our individual carbon footprints and our government is reeling in more and more of our hard earned cash in penalties for not being ‘green’ enough, the suppliers of just about anything we need or choose to buy entomb their product in ever increasing volumes of plastic – much of which has to be hacked open with a sharp knife!

I am in the market for a new pair of headphones. The very first pair of headphones I ever bought came in a cardboard box. I remember them well. There was no plastic and no polystyrene. Just the headphones with their cable. There wasn’t even a slip of paper explaining that the best way to use them was to place each ‘cup’ over an ear and insert the jack plug into the headphone socket of my hifi amplifier. No dire warnings that trying to eat them might not be beneficial to my health nor even a suggestion that turning the volume up to the full 60 watts per channel would not be the best idea of the day. More importantly, the chap who sold them to me was able to take them out of the box and let me try them on so I could quickly decide if they were comfortable.

Today they come encased in a bubble of heat sealed stiff plastic that requires an industrial strength circular saw to cut through and the chap in John Lewis said they could not take them out for me to try because it was against health and safety regulations. I’m not sure if that last bit is true but it wouldn’t surprise me. Nothing surprises me when it comes down to the dreaded Health and Safety that is trying to render our lives impotent and risk-free. As I was after a pair of expensive noise-cancelling phones and rather liked the look and reputation of the Sennheiser pair they had on sale, I asked the guy if he really thought I was going to splash out £119 on something I might not like when I finally managed to extract them. I got an unhelpful shrug for that one. Undaunted I made tracks for the last, local independent hi-fi shop. Gone. Put out of business by the likes of John Lewis and the frighteningly awful Curry’s.

So – still no headphones. But I DO have a box of the most wonderful Amaretti biscotti, bought back for me by my son on a recent trip to Italy. They are an absolute delight when compared to the little lumps of tooth-breaking stuff sold in Sainsbury’s. Each one is individually wrapped in a little plastic bag that requires a pair of scissors to open. It is then further wrapped in a delightful twist of paper. They are all then wrapped in another plastic bag that I was able to open without recourse to a sharp instrument. And finally they are placed in a splendid cardboard box.

Maybe it is a ploy to try and stop me eating them in one sitting.

I am in the market for some cushions. Having finally bought a sofa – something we did without for many years – I now want some nice, comfortable cushions. Something I can surround myself with when, late at night, I start to doze off while watching old re-runs of Star Trek sipping that last glass of wine.

But this is where the problems start. Modern cushion ’stuffing’ is so bloody awful that within a week or so of use they are virtually flat. Ideally I want one filled with feather but we have an added problem with that route as my wife is allergic to the stuff. And it is this very allergy that explains why our house is bursting at the seams with pillows. We seem to have hundreds of them… OK… we have lots and lots of them. Pillows of just about every description and stuffing imaginable, all in an attempt to find an alternative to feather that actually is both comfortable to sleep on and does not go flat after one nights use.

Stroll through any shop selling pillows and after ignoring the feather variety you can take a safe bet that the rest are filled with something that bears the ominous name of ‘polyester hollowfibre’. I don’t know about anyone else but those words send a shudder of dismay through me. Not only was it obviously cooked up in a laboratory somewhere but rest your head on a bag full of the stuff and within seconds you are sinking. It has no substance. At the other end of the spectrum there is ‘memory foam’ which is a good name because I tried it once and remember it only too well.

We have both had some measure of success in the past though. My wife swears by her water pillow and takes it everywhere she goes when we travel. I am not a fan as every time you move your head there is this sloshing noise beneath you which in me would probably induce nightmares. The best pillows I had were stuffed with pure cotton and were made in Texas by someone called Kate. If they got too compacted you were supposed to leave them out in the hot sun all day. Maybe a good idea in Texas but not that practical in my part of England. Then there are the ‘Han’ pillows – stuffed with the dreaded ‘hollowfibre’ but framed with springs that give the pillow body. Buckwheat is a good filler too except for the noise, which sounds like you are rattling a box of cornflakes beside you ear whenever you move your head!

In this modern world of instant communication, space travel and ever improving robots you would think that developing a synthetic feather would be child’s play.

(Note: Hunt as I might I have been unable to find “Kate’s Texas Cotton Stuffed Pillow” website or that for the excellent “Han Pillow”. They both used to be there, that I do know…)

I hope anyone passing through here has a very happy and joyful Christmas and if you don’t happen to celebrate this particular festival – well – I hope you have a good week.

My recent absence can partially be explained by a sort of ‘domino effect’. My wife has just undergone some serious surgery to her shoulder rendering her one-armed and me needing to learn how to cook. One of our dogs, in a misguided but almost uncanny act of sympathy then mysteriously damaged her spine and has a couple of compressed discs and now joins her mistress in both the pain stakes and the number of pills she is popping. And because of that I had to lift her in and out of the car to get her to the Vet during which I twisted badly and damaged my neck. So it hasn’t been a fun-packed week!

I did manage to put up the Christmas decorations here at Yellow Swordfish though! And I’ll be back in the New Year.