St Theo's Day 2023 Fliers

The fliers for this year's St Theo's Day are finished. Pretty soon I shall print and distribute them. This year, as with last year, I have produced two different fliers, one for the Oxfordshire hospitals on my doorstep; and another to be distributed to other institutions around the country. I will send the second national flier by post, addressed to the porters in those institutions.

NB: The venue and time have changed for the Oxford event. It is now at the Swan and Castle, Castle Street, Oxford, starting at 5 PM.

St Theo's Flyer 2023 (JR) by Ben Emlyn-Jones on Scribd

St Theo's Flyer 2023 (National) by Ben Emlyn-Jones on Scribd

I Lied to Jack

 

One of the most infamous figures in my long struggle to maintain my Hospital Porters' Pride and Dignity is a man I call "Jack Shaw". I've mentioned Jack several times before, see the background links below. Over the course of my twenty-three year HPing career dozens of people "popped the question", but most of them did it just once and then let the matter go; Jack was different. I don't know why he took such an extreme and obsessive attitude to my little answer of "no", but he really did. This is despite the fact, or maybe because of it, he had himself been a porter for five years before "going up the ladder" to get a nursing diploma and qualifying as an ODP- Operating Department Practitioner. His insistence got worse as the years went by. He said things like: "You're nuts for not doing your training, Ben! Nuts!" Luckily I was only in the same department with him for a few months and so saw little of him on duty. My interactions with him were mostly in the social club and other hospital hangouts. I found his manner very abrasive. These days I would have forced him to back off a lot sooner; but in those days I suffered from a hyper-agreeable disorder (totally self-inflicted though, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2020/11/nice-guys-reply-to-stefan-molyneux.html). Despite this he eventually pushed me too far. We were in The Britannia Inn talking to one of my brother porters who had just left to become a theatre nursing auxiliary (He was back as a HP within a month!) and I gave him my best wishes. Jack went berserk. He hurled abuse at me in from of my brother porter and everybody in the pub. I retaliated with equally aggressive words and stormed off. As well as being angry I was baffled. How dare he try to tell me what to do with my own life; yet, I wondered if he ever looked in the mirror and asked himself why he suffered from this mania. I only saw Jack a few times after that and he was more subdued. He popped the question one last time in a light-hearted tone to indicate he was only joking. He left Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals Trust a few years before I did. Last time I heard he was at a hospital in Southampton... Until about two months ago when I bumped into him again.
 
I was in a cafe near the area of Oxford where I work when Jack walked in. Despite not having seen him for only about fifteen years he looked about thirty years older than how I remember him, but I still recognized him. I instinctively turned my head away, but it was too late. Our gazes met; he smiled and said. "Ben!"
    I returned his smile, but inwardly I was bracing myself. Since my dismissal I've been imagining how Jack must have reacted to the news. For him this was a vindication and a just punishment for my crime; the crime of being different to him, the crime of refusing to obey the commands that he had passed over my life. I knew he would have been overjoyed and must have longed for the opportunity to meet me so he could gloat. We exchanged greetings. I asked him what he was doing and he told me about his current employment in an orthopaedic theatre suite. He was in the area visiting old friends who were still at OxRad. Then came the moment I had been dreading. I'm not sure if I'm being paranoid, but I saw a very subtle smug smile break out on his face. "So, Ben... I heard you'd been sacked. What are you doing with yourself these days?"
    I hadn't planned what came next. It was instinctive. I lied: "I'm at a private hospital in London, Harley Street actually." I'm still astonished at how automatic and elaborate my deception was.
    Jack flushed slightly. "Hey? How did you get that job? How come they took you on after your discharge from the NHS?"
    "I won my appeal. Despite that, my life there was tainted and I decided to leave."
    Jack paused and frowned dejectedly. This was supposed to have been his moment of glory, but it had all gone terribly wrong. "Which hospital?"
    "The Plastic Surgery Group." Luckily I had spoken recently online to somebody who worked there so knew some of the details of the London private medical scene, enough to bluff Jack anyway.
    "What's your job there?"
    I gave a haughty chuckle. "You know the answer to that question, Jack."
    He paused and looked down. "So you're a porter?"
    "Yup."
    Our conversation ended quickly after that. Jack seemed to be in a hurry to get away from me. He drained his coffee and left.
    I know I'm taking a risk writing this article because if he sees it he will recognize himself and know that I had fooled him. However, I'm pretty confident he doesn't know about the HPWA and certainly does not read it. Also, I've waited two months before publishing this experience. I know some of you will be very critical of me for lying to him. It is disrespectful to tell false tales about one's own life; but then again, how much respect did he ever show me? He tried to dictate to me what I can and cannot do with my own life, as if I were a misguided child instead of a fellow grown man. He grossly violated my boundaries. He put pressure on me persistently and insultingly not to be my own person. He tried desperately to turn me into a Jack Shaw Mark II. I do not owe everybody the truth. I will not give people the truth when all they will do with my honesty is exploit it. My honesty, in this situation, would be nothing more than me handing Jack stick to beat me with. He has not earned the right to the truth. He deserves what he got, to be tricked. I'm not ashamed; in fact I'm glad I did it.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/10/popping-question-responses.html.
And: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/01/ten-years-on.html.

Simon Le Bon was a HP

 

Readers much younger than me may not know what I'm talking about, but for 80's kids Duran Duran was a name on everybody's lips. For me it brings up memories of school discos, mullet hairstyles and girls in leg-warmers squealing with excitement. Duran Duran was probably the leading act in the New Romantic musical scene of the early 1980's and were renowned for their stunning videos, abstract lyrics and for the band members' status as sex symbols. They were formed by four young men from Birmingham in 1978 and quickly became enormously successful. Some music journalists were even predicting that they could be the new Beatles. As the lead vocalist, Le Bon was the focus of Duran Duran's fame. When he married a girl from Oxford called Yasmin, she received death threats from Simon's jealous female fans. Simon joined the band in 1980 just before they reached the hit parade. Before that he had sung in a punk band called Dog Days and had a go at being an actor. However, most importantly of all, he was a hospital porter. He joined the crew at Northwick Park Hospital in the London Borough of Brent and served as a theatre porter as well as an A&E porter during the 70's before taking up singing fulltime. There is an interesting article about this by another HP, Rupert Loydell. Rupert and Simon were never friends, but they were sometimes shift partners. Rupert left portering in 1980 to teach sailing and art in Michigan USA. He returned to Britain and signed on for a second period at the hospital. When he asked the other porters where Simon was they just pointed at the TV set. There was their brother porter Simon Le Bon singing to a crowd of thousands. Of course, the majority of people will describe this transformation as something along the lines of: "he started from humble beginnings and went up in the world." Rupert himself describes his feelings thus: "Anyone who works in the arts and lives long enough, comes across others who become famous, make it big, appear on the TV or have successful exhibitions. It helps make one feel you stand a chance." I, as you know, regard the situation very differently. Source: https://internationaltimes.it/duran-duran/. I salute MEP&DBP Simon. He kept me entertained as a child, but little did I know I would soon follow in his illustrious footsteps.

Serial Releavers

 

Of all the stereotypical hospital portering characters that I have identified, the serial releaver is the only one I really cannot understand. A serial releaver is a HP who basically spends his entire working life in HPing, but every so often, usually two or three times a decade, he will leave portering for another job, most often outside healthcare entirely; and then return after anything from a few weeks to a couple of months. This behaviour makes no sense to me. They gain nothing from it. Leaving the NHS can sometimes be a one-way ticket, even if you don't get dismissed like I was. It is something that should never be taken on lightly. You run the risk of not being allowed back in. You might think "but I'm a good worker; they'll always take me back." That is a very naive thing to say. The NHS does not care how good or bad you are at your job, as I have explained before, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2016/12/nurse-sacked-for-praying.html. If you are turned down for recruitment after reapplying then it will probably be because you have made a personal enemy of somebody in authority; and who doesn't ever do that? I have known a few serial releavers who were blocked from rejoining because of this. Another disadvantage is that you break your service and therefore lose all your long service benefits and pay increments. You have to start again at the bottom from scratch. So why are so many porters serial releavers? I suspect it may simply be virtue signalling at convention. Peer pressure is one of the most powerful forces in most people's lives. Because HP's are not supposed to love our work, some of us feel obliged to make gestures to show other people we do not... even if we do. I notice that serial releavers also engineer other persona displays along these lines. They say things to me like "a job's just a job, mate"; and they also tell everybody all the time that they are going to leave and that they are looking for other work, even right in the middle of the HPing phase of their releaving cycle. One Delivery Suite porter I remember used to leave a newspaper on the lodge table open at the jobs ads page whenever he went off duty. He clearly wanted to drop hints to the next shift about what his intentions were, or supposed intentions. That is frustrating and tragic. If they are attached to the Hospital Portering Service then why not just admit it, like I do, and stay in it permanently?

Posters for The Gas Spanner

I have created a series of posters for The Gas Spanner. Listening figures for the show have been dropping lately and that is my own fault for not promoting it enough and also not doing enough shows. I'm up to Programme 34, but that's after two and a half years. I intend to give The Spanner a permanent weekly slot, Sunday evening, and I am distributing the notices more widely. I'll do the same with these posters. One of them is in Welsh. I'm in the process of designing some more.

Paper Mask- The Book

 

See here for essential background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/08/cabal-on-paper-mask.html.
I occasionally go through phases in which I feel totally masochistic. This time, in order to stop myself beating my own forehead with a cricket bat I decided to do something I've been plucking up courage to do for a very long time, I've read the book of Paper Mask. The novel A Paper Mask was published in 1987 and penned by the film's screenwriter, a Scotsman called John Collee. The author is surprisingly mainstream, having been behind far superior productions such as Happy Feet and Star Cops. He comes from Edinburgh and graduated in medicine from its university. He practiced in Cambridge, probably Addenbrooke's, also Bath and Bristol. This may be why the Harris/Hennessey character flees to Bristol under his fake identity. Matthew Harris is very like Ripley, the antihero of a series of books by Patricia Highsmith. As I've said before, he is not a likeable or admirable central character. He is a ruthless liar and exploiter; and a coward whose only emotion is fear, and he only feels it when his own welfare is threatened. As a doctor, Collee was in the perfect place to do research for his story. It is quite a short book just 224 pages in the edition I have, see illustration, and I read it in a couple of days. Of course the most interesting element of the book for me was how it portrays the hospital porters so I paid special attention to the first couple of chapters, before Matthew Harris assumes the identity of Dr Simon Hennessey.
 
The fictional hospital where the story starts is called West Harwood. In the opening scene Matthew and Alec are waiting to transfer a patient from a ward and the former laments about how half of a hospital porter's life is waiting for other people. The narrative is in Matthew's first person. He and Alec place bets on what is wrong with the patient. This first glimpse of portering life, especially the dry humour, is quite accurate, although it's an exaggeration to say half our time is spent waiting for others; maybe twenty percent. However, in the next scene I read: "There's not much pleasure to be derived from endlessly transferring patients from ward to ward." Firstly, that is not the only role played by a HP and secondly, most people who expressed a preference said that they did find that duty enjoyable. I was even once told that by an obs and gynae consultant who had portered during his holidays from medical school for two months. "I'll never forget it." he said. "It's changed my life." Harris is a very observant man and during his aforementioned downtime, he watches the doctors and nurses at work, suturing wounds, inserting drips, changing dressings and the myriad of other medical tasks; and he begins to see doctors as "a pretty ordinary bunch" and that medicine was "ridiculously straightforward". This is a deluded judgement. Doctors and nurses have to train for years and continuously study hard to learn to do what they do. Experts always make things look easy to a layman. Harris and the real Simon Hennessey become acquaintances and Harris feels bitter envy towards him. When Hennessey dies Harris feels a "rush of pleasure". One thing psychopaths are acutely aware of is social status. This is why psychopaths cannot usually endure the HP life; it is too lowly and there are too many people above them. I have known at least once psycho in my own HPing career, but he did indeed soon leave portering to go "up the ladder!", albeit by a more conventional and lawful route than Harris. Harris is unwilling to get too close to his brother porters because "I'd be infected by their hopelessness." He notices how in the pubs near hospitals where the staff congregate (the West Harwood appears to have no social club), there is subconscious social segregation. The doctors and nurses crowd round each other in the lounge while the porters congregate by the dartboard. This is an accurate observation, but, unlike Harris, I never saw it as a bad thing. Alec is a more developed character in the book than he is in the film. He actually expresses some of the same sentiments I do: "We're a crucial part of the system, Matthew. We inject a bit of humour, a bit of goodwill. You can't put a price on that." Alec is actually a proud and dignified HP! Harris dismisses his friend's ideals with cold cynicism. "Any fool can wheel trolleys about." Not true; it takes a special kind of person to do that task well and stick to it. Harris scornfully rejects Alec's positivity, believing that it is nothing more than the false aggrandizement of menial labour that is characteristic of "the Scottish working class." He also refers to Alec as "a blundering Celtic oaf." Matthew is different to his brother porters in that his parents were quite middle class. You can tell that by the accent of the character in the movie. His mother ran a shop and his sister is a hotel manager in Hong Kong. His mother cannot "hide her disappointment in me." Harris considers himself a washout; but he is also, paradoxically, a snob. The plot of the book is more or less the same as the film, which you would expect seeing as John Collee adapted the script himself. There are a few deviations though; for example, Christine gets her own voice in the form of letters to a friend at the start of each chapter. Harris also first tries to kill Alec by running him over in a car, not pushing him off a cliff. The finale of the book is far more open-ended. There is a hint, on the very last page, that Matthew Harris is not going to get away with his chicanery after all. See: https://www.johncollee.com/novels.
 
Because the novel is a first person narration, it is difficult to grasp the author's own opinions on hospital portering. All we know is the derogatory attitude the Matthew Harris character feels towards us. The book portrays HP's in a manner that is equally patronizing and insulting; however I got the impression that this attitude might after all be an essential element of the theme rather than the author's personal derision. I feel far more well-disposed towards John Collee now I have read his original novel. Generally, my opinion of both the book and film is the same, but my feelings towards the story itself have mellowed slightly.
See here for more background: http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2012/11/paper-mask-online.html.

Day in the Life of a HP

 

A number of videos have appeared online that are so stylistically distinctive they have quickly formed a new genre. The genre could be called something like "a day in the life of a Silicon Valley employee". A typical one would be about four minutes long and on TikTok. It would be technically well produced and be narrated by the uploader, usually young and female, as she describes her day working for one of the Big Tech giants; Google, Twitter, Meta etc. I say "work", but one thing that strikes me immediately when I watch them is that these people do very little of it. These Silicon Valley office blocks are more like hotels or leisure centres than workplaces. The employee arrives and usually consumes a very posh coffee with various yuppie accessories like toffee cream or aniseed sugar lumps. They then have a meeting for about quarter of an hour followed by lunch at the office's posh restaurant, then a trip to the gym or sauna, followed by another coffee on the roof garden, etc etc; you get the picture. Here's a prime example: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamitzelromero/video/7171572776258604331. Of course this genre has been mercilessly parodied, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azSYS5WDJLQ (I voted Leave, but I still laughed at it). The other day I thought about doing one for hospital porters. Obviously I can't film it myself because I am not an active serving HP anymore, but I can write the script. Here it is:
 
A Day in the Life of a Hospital Porter
featuring Ben Emlyn-Jones- John Radcliffe, Oxford
Hi there! I'm a hospital porter in Oxford and welcome to a day in my life! I get up at 4.30 AM; two alarm clocks means I can't oversleep. I admit I'm a bit tired because I didn't come off duty till 10 PM yesterday and I'm a bit hungry because I was too exhausted to eat dinner when I got home. I walk from my home in Littlemore through the crystal waters of winter rain. It's dark for the whole journey this time of year. Once I clock in I am sent to Delivery Suite to clean a theatre after a pretty gory caesarean section/hysterectomy. I change into theatre scrubs which I remove as soon as I finish because they're covered in blood. After that, thank God!, I'm redeployed to general theatres. There I crouch for forty-five minutes in Theatre 8 holding onto a patient's gangrenous leg while Mr Jefferies and Dr Patel amputate it. After it is wrapped I get to carry the leg to the incinerator for disposal. Then, finally I can have my morning coffee. It's an instant from a forty kilo wholesaler's can can, mixed with Sainsbury's powdered milk and sugar from a bowl filled with dark stains from previous teaspoons. Is that coffee, tea or cocoa? They always add an unexpected extra flavour! Before I can continue work I am called to the boss' office because a sister from CCU reckons I was rude to her last night. My head porter is a college graduate who is younger than my daughter and has never done a day's portering in his life, but who cares? I tell him I can't even remember who this bitch is... Well, I didn't call her that to his face. He believes her and not me of course. I spend the rest of the morning walking from ward to ward, from department to department, doing all kind of jobs. At midday a corpse arrives at the back door. Judging by the way he smells he was dead for quite a while before anybody picked him up. Then finally it's lunchtime! I go to the canteen, trying not to think of the body. The JRH kitchen serves me the best chicken pie and chips you can get outside... a chip shop. Then finally it is 2 PM and I'm due to go off duty, but then... lo and behind! My 2-10 relief never shows up. Is he off sick?... No, he actually booked leave three months ago, but nobody bothered to tell me. "You don't mind staying on, do you, Ben? If you don't our shift will be in the shit big time." "Oh alright, I say." An hour later I wish I'd kept my mouth shut. There's a major incident; train derailment in Banbury. The Horton General is taking the walking wounded and the rest come to us. I shuffle battered, bloodstained, broken moaning and weeping people around for what feels like an eternity. At 9 PM I go to the toilet. When I open the tap to wash my hands I can see faces in the water. These have to be the best fatigue hallucinations I've ever had! At 10 PM I finally stagger to the bus stop. I fall asleep on the bus and the driver wakes me at Cowley Centre, six stops after the one where I was meant to get off. I walk the rest of the way home, treading carefully on my sore feet, and smile as I open my front door and see a pile of envelopes lying there. Bills galore! Gas, electricity, council tax; and they've all gone up. Time for bed now I think. And that's all folks! Hope you liked it. Like, share, subscribe!