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Just the thing to entertain the kids waiting for the doctor

Mike's Pith & Wind - Waiting
One of Bill’s favourite sayings was ‘Hurry up and wait’ which was by way of a commentary on the musicians’ lot. Although by no means confined to our chosen career path, musos do seem to do an awful lot of waiting.
This tendency might depend on the musicians involved though. Personally I’d rather be early to a gig than late, but I see enough bands still setting up nonchalantly after the advertised start time to be aware that my views aren’t necessarily the prevailing or even popular ones.
Musicians do have to wait round a lot for their brief moments in the spotlight, but there are everyday events that require some serious waiting around. For instance, going to the doctor is a bit of a lottery when it comes to waiting – well going to see my doctor is anyway. My doctor is the last of a dying breed – he works alone, i.e. not in a conglomerate-style medical centre, his surgery resembles a set from a sixties’ doctors and nurses’ sitcom and, most importantly, he bulk bills as a matter of course.
The other morning I breezed into my doctor’s antique waiting room, (typically replete with a matching set of creaky, uncomfortable chairs and the sepia portrait of one of the King Georges on the wall), intent on having my prostate digitally examined as I couldn’t actually remember when I’d last had it inspected and my imagination was beginning to run rampant. After I’d presented my Medicare card to the receptionist, who disconcertingly remembered my name, she.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - The art of overwriting
‘Downstream in the dark, meanwhile, there was no hint of the full moon that would transform the scene later on. No-one else was left on the bridge and the few on the quay were all hastening the same way. Prised loose from the balustrade at last by the more compelling note from the belfries, I hastened to follow. I didn’t want to be late’.
With these words Patrick Leigh Fermor concluded the first of the three volumes that recorded his walk from the Rotterdam to Istanbul which he began in September 1933 at the age of eighteen. He commenced writing them when he was 62, and the books are a fascinating remembrance of a world that was soon to be almost entirely annihilated by the on-coming war. He had departed with ‘a few clothes, several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but.. read more