More UCH!

 

See here for essential background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2025/07/uch.html.
I have gone back to check out the main entrance and public areas of the University College Hospital in London. It was indeed grand, intimidating and pretentious as I predicted; but it was slightly different to what I expected. It was smaller in terms of footprint, which may simply be inevitable on the crowded ground of such a large city. The main entrance consists of a reception desk on the left, manned solely by civilians, and a very prominent security station opposite; another effect of London society. Between them are rows of public seats; not very comfortable ones, similar to those in A&E, see above. The hospital makes up for the lack of horizontal space by going vertical. The floor is dwarfed by a huge atrium rising about eight to ten floors above it. Like the JR West Wing, the atrium has balconies; this architectural template has unfortunately not gone away. However, perhaps the planners are now finally reading the HPWA because the glass parapets are far taller, over six feet. Still, I think the danger will only be removed when they copy the JRH and install floor-to-ceiling windows, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/12/jumpers-update.html. The back door to the main street is only about fifty feet away and it opens onto Beaumont Place. There is a lift bay to the north side where I found a pair of baryatric wheelchairs parked below a decorative montage of the hospital's history. The lifts carry you to almost all the ward and departmental areas. To the south side is a huge area with the strange name of "Podium". I went there and saw that it was a standard visitors', public and staff rest area combined with a cafeteria and several shops selling the usual newspaper, sweets and snacks. The PALS, patient advice and liaison service, office was tucked into a corner. There are posters everywhere introducing members of staff from all disciplines, but none from portering that I could see. they included a security officer, catering operator, physiotherapist, an orthopaedic doctor, chaplain, nurse and radiographer. There was also a corridor art gallery; another feature of hospitals that seems to be universal, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2026/01/breaking-bad-art-gallery.html. There was also what looked like a museum cabinet displaying some military medals, presumably awarded to members of staff during wartime. There were also very old documents and letter next to them; I didn't stop to read about any details. There was an internal pharmacy office on the ground floor that had a portable air conditioner, a pipe snaked through the door and the extractor vent was shoved into an overhead duct. The whole place was painted white. Not just pastel with a bit of colour mixed it; it was pure white. After walking around for a while I finally found the most important thing I was looking for, a brother porter. He was dropping off a patient in a wheelchair in the public seating area. His uniform was dark blue and he wore a name badge saying "Peter" with the word "porter" in smaller print below it. I said: "I'm one of you! A hospital porter at the John Radcliffe, Oxford. Pride and dignity, brother!" I saluted him. Peter looked confused. He was young and clearly a recent African immigrant. He didn't reply, but he did smile back at me. For some reason the open area directly outside the main entrance on Euston Road is decorated by what looked like a giant pebble. I found my very brief visit to the UCH interesting, but rather dismaying. The place is bland, corporate, tense and cheap. The decorations and pretty pictures did not solve those matters. My dismay is not mixed with surprise.

They Won't All Get Your Jokes

 

As I've noted several times, if you are a HP or indeed in any acute healthcare profession, it's likely you will develop an unusual sense of humour, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2025/03/rose-cottage-humour.html. Unfortunately not everybody will understand your sense of humour if they have not shared your unique experience of such service. This can easily lead to misunderstandings and offence. You have to be careful whom you share some of your hospital jokes with. Case in point: I was on a patients' forum a while ago, one which I won't identify, when somebody was telling the story of their endoscopy appointment. Endoscopy is a medical technique in which a doctor examines the inside of a patient's body using a small electronic camera. It is an alternative to diagnostic surgery. It is far less invasive and can usually be done in outpatients. It has only been carried out for a couple of decades because the technology has only recently been invented. The most common kind of procedure is to insert the camera, called an endoscope, into a body cavity such as the mouth, anus, vagina, urethra etc. One of the forum members was talking openly about his anal examination and I wrote as a reply: "I once dated a woman from endoscopy. She was surprisingly vanilla in bed!" This went down like a lead balloon. Nobody openly criticized me for it, I received no PM's from the moderator; but the usual replies and reactions were absent indicating the social media equivalent of a stony silence. I deleted my comment and things went back to normal. The joke I had made was one distinctly embedded in hospital culture. Jokes are funnier when you don't have to explain them, but maybe I should have just left it on the thread and posted an apology-stroke-explanation below it. It compares the practices of endoscopy to extreme sexual activity; bondage, S&M etc. The term "vanilla" was used by one of the characters in the book Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James, a bestseller about violent sex. It means normal sex without the violence... As the late great Frankie Howerd used to say, please yourselves! I really should have known better, but I can be a bit insensitive at times when reading other people on forums. Hope readers can avoid my mistake.

One for the Fesshole

 

The Fesshole is a social media phenomenon which acts as an outlet for people to reveal dark secrets and wrongdoings they have committed; funny not criminal. It is short for "confession hole" and probably refers to the anonymous opening in a church confessional between where the priest sits and his parishioner. A friend made me aware of it and some of its content is hilariously embarrassing; therefore the least I could do is contribute to it myself, and I have the perfect ingredient. Sometime back in the '90's I was having a drunken night in with some brother HP's and a few hangers on. It started in the social club after the 2-10 had finished and ended up in Arthur Sanctuary House, the main staff accommodation block. One of the revellers was called Oswald, not his real name. He was not a porter and was not even on the civilian staff. How he became attached to JRH society was always a bit of a mystery. He ended up marrying a nurse, but that was years later. Anyway, a nurse's dress made its appearance... somehow and Oswald put it on. This was for a joke of course, except he kept it on all night. (He eventually turned out to be bisexual, leaning heavily on the homo side; and that was not a surprise to anybody who knew him in those days.) We eventually left ASH and took a raucous stroll through the hospital grounds. This was relegated to the nearby streets after security threw us out. I can't quite recall what happened after that except that at about 3 AM I found myself wandering home carrying Oswald's stolen nurse's dress.

In those days I lived with my parents shortly after splitting up with my daughter's mother and when I got home everybody was asleep at that hour. I can't remember my thought processes, or what passed for them after about five pints of cider and a dozen vodka shots, but I decided to put the dress in the laundry basket. I think I just wanted to see what happened if I did. It took about two days and then my mother called me into the lounge where she was reclined in her armchair as usual. "Ben, could you come here for a moment please?" She always addressed me like a head porter summoning me to the office. "Ben, I found something strange while doing the washing; it looks like a nurse's uniform. Do you know how it got there?" I shook my head and replied: "No idea, mum." I was desperately suppressing the urge to laugh, and she knew it. My mother was disabled by a condition that was never identified, but it resembled multiple sclerosis and worsened steadily during her lifetime. As a result she suffered a lot of frustration by not being able to do much physical activity. By the time she died in 2006 she could barely walk a dozen steps. I think this was the main reason she was extremely paranoid, controlling and nosy. She wanted to know every single thing that went on in the house and in our lives. She continuously criticized everybody else over everything we did. She once challenged me because she thought I had been running a tap in the bathroom too hard. She worked this out by listening from the bottom of the stairs. Her ears were like a bat's. The problem was she always had absolute conviction in her own conclusions and believed she was incapable of making a mistake. Once she had decided on something she never changed her mind. As a result a lot of her judgements were wrong. I found this very bothersome. I think this was why I decided to plant the nurse's dress in the laundry. I knew she would find out and her brain would immediately start spinning like a flywheel to come up with some kind of explanatory model for how this situation had come about. I wanted some payback and gained a lot of catharsis from it. (This was for many other reasons to do with my terrible relationship with her.) She stared at me suspiciously while I struggled to keep a straight face. She frowned. "Are you sure, Ben?" "A hundred percent, mum." I responded. There was a long pause in which she glared at me balefully. "Alright, you can go now." Immediately afterwards I heard her on the phone talking to Isabel, her unofficial stepmother. I couldn't hear all the words, but I could guess the gist of the conversation: "A, B or C has happened. It's all Ben's fault and he is lying about it!" The phone-call lasted about an hour. I deliberately avoided moving closer to hear the words because it would have caused me a lot of emotional pain; see here for background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/10/am-i-gate-child.html. After that my father came home for work and it was his turn on the stretching rack. There were no raised voices. Arguments between my parents were always calmly one-sided. My mother accused and attacked, and my father just bowed his head took the shit. At one point I heard him say: "I really know nothing about this, Marga!" She didn't believe him. They themselves had a very rocky marriage involving all kinds of ménage à plusieurs that I won't describe in detail because it involves more painful childhood memories. If you're curious, this is a where I have covered some of it previously: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2019/10/peter-croft-and-ben-emlyn-jones.html. That was not the end of it. For about three weeks afterwards my mother drove herself into a frenzy trying to solve The Mystery of the Appearing Nurse's Dress. At one point I overheard her talking to her friends that she suspected my father of having an affair with one of the domiciliary nurses who cared for her. I was tempted at that point to come clean, but my bitterness stopped me. For most of my life I had resented my parents enormously; my mother for her malice and my father for his weakness. So I left the outrage to play itself out. Did I enjoy it? Yes, I had to giggle continuously under the blankets on my bed so nobody could hear me. Do I feel guilty? Maybe slightly, but not to any great degree. This all happened about thirty years ago. Eventually the storm blew over and our family returned to normal. I retrieved the dress from the washing machine and returned it to Uniform Issue. There you have it! I've confessed! Not that it makes any difference. My mother and Isabel are dead and my father never reads the HPWA. Still, I hope you who do so enjoyed this little acknowledgment of misdemeanour.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2020/02/humiliation-reply-to-stefan-molyneux.html.