Just a slightly cryptic clue that my wretched leg continues to be a problem even after seeing four doctors, visiting two hospitals and getting eight prescriptions.  Every single person I discussed it with (Other than those medically qualified) asked what to the ignorant might seem the somewhat obvious question about x-rays/scans, neither of which had ever been suggested during consultations, some of which didn’t even feature an actual examination of the offending limb.

Being of an organised disposition I rang the surgery on Thursday, four days before one of my many prescriptions was due to run out.  I was told to get my local pharmacy to request a repeat.  I rang the chemist, they rang the doctor and I rang the chemist again to find out how things were going.  ‘It will be here on Tuesday’ they said, ‘ what with it being a Bank Holiday’.  My judgement clouded by pain I optimistically rang on Tuesday to discover that no repeat prescription had arrived.  The chemist rang the doctors, I rang the chemist and they announced with an air of victory that it would be there.  On Thursday.

Obviously I should have remembered that we are renowned as a nation of animal lovers.  People, not so much.  When my cat was ill I went to the nearby 24 hour vet.  Sadly animals get ill out of hours and on Bank Holidays, which is clearly yet another way in which they differ from humans.

Following  a stern talking to from my big sister, a woman you wouldn’t want to trifle with, I decided it was time to put on my tiara and remind them who they were dealing with.  Sometimes it is the only way forward.

The next Doctor was another locum and very charming.  And again no question of pestering me with a needless physical examination.  I related the sorry history of the prescription (He didn’t even have the wit to blush with shame) and said that I would like fewer drugs and something more along the lines of a diagnosis.  What exactly is wrong with me?

He smiled ruefully. ‘That’s the million dollar question’ he said.  ‘And I think it’s rather your job to answer it’ I replied, giving him the look I normally reserve for unrepentant mass murderers who I’ve taken a dislike to.

So three more prescriptions and a promise (!) to arrange for an MRI scan.

I think he may change his mind about choosing  for medicine when he finishes his ‘A’ levels and opt for accountancy.  If he’s recovered by then.

Yet another of those sentences I could never imagine myself writing, up there with ‘Why you should join a gym’ or ‘Buy fewer shoes’, although if my poorly leg doesn’t improve soon I may request amputation and have an awful lot of right, size 39 footwear to sell.

I went to bed the other night with a slightly sore leg; the sort of pain that you might get after walking a great distance, obviously something I have only ever read about in books. 2 paracetamols and think no more about it.

As I attempted to descend the stairs next morning to get some coffee the pain had become so excruciating that sweat began running down my face and I had to sit down before I vomited and no, it wasn’t a hangover. Something definitely not quite right.

Consultation with highly qualified chums (retired) resulted in the universally agreed view, a first with the medical profession, that I should ‘get it looked at’.  Part one of your re-vamped A Level maths paper is to work out the chances of that happening and part two is to estimate the prospect of getting an appointment within 6-12 months. (Show your working).  So, so wrong students.  There was an appointment that very morning!

It was with a locum who never once raised her eyes from the computer screen and asked some very peculiar questions.  She advised me to take my temperature every two hours in case it was sepsis and to keep prodding the leg in case it went hard in which case it could be a blood clot.  So not just a spot of sciatica Doctor?  I left with several prescriptions and hobbled off to buy an accurate thermometer.  She rang later  – another staggering first for a Doctor in my experience – to say that she had made an appointment for me at the local hospital for the very next day.  Either this is a woman with a LOT of influence or I’m at death’s door.  I spent a sleepless night having opted for the latter.

A chum who is already beatified (Look it up) drove me to the hospital and before she had even parked the car I was whisked in to see a lovely young woman in rather fetching gold flip flops who looked flabbergasted when I mentioned the life threatening options and said it was clearly a pulled muscle.  She even examined the offending limb.  Not having met me before she was further puzzled by my astonishment that pulling a muscle was even a remote possibility.  I left with five more prescriptions and a slightly longer life expectancy than the day before.

Now for the advanced sums.  Two of the tablets have to be taken once a day.  The next one is twice a day.  Number four is 1 tablet three times a day and the last one is two tablets to be taken four times a day.  This one with meals.  Got that?  Now draw a Venn diagram.  Being a woman of widely acknowledged wisdom I made her put this down on paper before I left so at least one of us knew what was going on, once you could make out the writing.  And absolutely no alcohol.

Finally estimate the chances, to three decimal points, of anyone getting the medications correctly administered before they are killed by an unholy cocktail of drugs mixed with confusion, temperance and despair.  I bet you wish you’d paid more attention at school, as belatedly do I, but on the plus side the pass mark nowadays is only 10%.  Consider swopping to drama studies and send flowers to the usual address.

It has been an unusually busy week, even for me, and not helped by evil Sluice Nurse persuading me to go the Festival Hall.  Not to see a concert; I should be most surprised to discover that she is aware that it is actually a performance venue, but to drink in their Skylon bar.  This was to gaze on the flowing waters of the Thames as we sipped a little glass of rose.  Unfortunately, due to the angle of the setting sun, the blinds were down so we had no option but to drown our disappointment in industrial quantities of gin. I hope she got home in one piece but let me know if you stumble across a ‘Body of elderly woman discovered in water after three weeks’ story in your local press.

I have also been parading my thespian skills in a film, playing the part of a judge (Obvious casting decision) but discovering too late to cancel that there was no 40 foot Winnebago for me in the car park and the costume/hair/make-up budget was not even a gleam in the producer’s eye.  There was, by way of a little consolation,  a great deal of cake.  Let me know ASAP if you want tickets for the premiere.

A lost evening of inebriation was required to offset the increasingly gloomy and hysterical stories about B*****.  People, stop it.  The sun will still rise but all we hear is despond.  ‘There will be no lettuce, no medicine, no daylight’ shriek the Remoaners ever more shrilly.  Why, oh why, are there so few interviews with the 52% who thought it would be a Good Thing?  I have written to the ‘Today’ programme with that very question but have yet to receive a reply.  I did hear Ian Duncan Smith on the World Service when he got quite shirty with the negativity of the interviewer and only used the word ‘Poppycock’ to dismiss the horror stories, displaying a far greater level of self-restraint than I could have managed.

There are two sides to most stories but increasingly a given view takes precedence and no other opinion is tolerated.  B***** is bad, Remain is the only way forward.  All rich people are thieves and exploiters and everyone poor is an angel.  All refugees are fleeing from desperate oppression and no economic migrant has every landed here with the sole intention of exploiting the system.  Meat eaters are monsters and no sentence can be uttered or printed that does not contain the word ‘vegan’.

Tolerance, reader, is a two way street.  You cannot berate people for holding right wing views and imagine yourself to be a liberal.  If someone wants to smoke, eat only steak or send their child to a private school then it is none of your business.  None of these things are illegal and until they are don’t presume to tell other people that their preferred way of living is wrong.  I bet they don’t do it to you.

I personally am a great fan of the Flat Earth Society, White sugar in my coffee and don’t think that my recycling of paper and glass is going to make one jot of difference to the life span of baby whales.  You may well disagree.  Just have the good manners not to tell me so.  The sermon for today.

Step aside, the Brothers Grimm.  Here is a cautionary tale which at a stroke will turn your blood to ice.  I had intended to spare you the utter horror, gentle readers, until therapy had helped me come to terms with the total dreadfulness of the last few weeks but you demanded news, sadly compassion is way too draining to last for long and so HERE IT IS!

Mindful as ever of the Biblical tale of the wise virgins, I never leave home with all my credit, membership and store loyalty cards, motivated not so much by good sense as by the collective weight of them.  They are kept in a blue makeup bag on my dressing table and selected on a daily basis for the honour of a transfer to my very lovely Hermes wallet and the prospect of a trip out.

I would ask you to imagine the cold, blind, heart-stopping panic when that bag went missing if I didn’t think it might lead to more than a few heart attacks. (I tend to attract an older profile of reader, to say the least).  It was on a par with losing your only child at Oxford Circus station in the week before Christmas. But worse. Far, far worse.

First there is disbelief.  It must be in the room; it never leaves the room.  Then you recall the massive house tidyings that have preceded various social occasions and suspect you might have shoved it into a drawer or cupboard along with armfuls of other junk that all too clearly indicated that your devotion to the minimalism of Marie Kondo has suffered a recent slippage.  Certainly don’t want visitors knowing that, after all your preaching.

I went through every single nook and cranny of that room – followed by the entire house – at least twice.  On the plus side I discovered masses of things that had slipped off the radar and at least one pair of shoes (possibly two) that I have no memory of purchasing.  Result!  But of the cards, nothing.  Even the usual praying to St Anthony of Padua failed.

Breathing deeply into a paper bag on day three I started the Everest-high task of replacing them, starting with my driving licence.  Being a child of the times I googled DVLA lost driving licence and filled in the application form.  There were about five or six hundred pages and required details like your passport number if you wanted them to use the same photograph.  It was only in the clear light of the next morning that I began to have doubts, especially about the cost of replacement, £77.60, which seemed a. An odd amount and b. Expensive for a plastic card, swiftly confirmed by Younger Son, that this was not the actual DVLA website.

There followed an hysterical phone call to the passport office at 10pm on Sunday night where a disinterested official assured me that no-one could get a duplicate of my passport.  I referred him, possibly brusquely, to the experience of Elder Son who has managed to replace his lost documents five times with next to no evidence, twice in foreign countries.  I then phoned the bank to cancel my sole remaining credit card which I had used on the “DVLA” application.

In the morning I rang the DVLA (A top way to pass the time if you have three or four hours with nothing else to do and no drying paint that needs watching) where another bored official told me that this happens all the time and these website are not total scams devoted to selling your identity to people traffickers, that’s probably just a side-line, they merely charge you for the bother of applying on your behalf and apparently that’s not actually illegal.  Well it jolly well should be.

Next on the to-do list was an attempt to remember all the other cards that needed replacing but my advice if this ever happens to you is DO NOT attempt to do this on-line.  That way lies madness and broken iPads.   Either phone or do it in person.  I won’t go through all of them but a prize for sheer incompetence must go to the girl at the Museums Association who, on being informed that I had lost my membership card, asked ‘Membership of what?’  First day, sweetie?

I hope this goes some way to explaining the absence of a blog, it being hard to type when you are heavily sedated in a padded room and I haven’t even mentioned having to commit a little light breaking and entering aided and abetted by my friend Elizabeth.  That is a story for another day, perhaps even within our lifetime.