Like a Longfin Eel

  This blog will always be a bit obsessed with Covid. Sorry.) I’m at the train station this evening; first time since the London trip. It’s humming and it’s wonderful. Not crowded. Just… normal. A man in front of me has a brompton too.  It’s warm, not too hot, and the evening light gleams softly off a shimmer on the back of another mans bald head. I’m zoning out, staring into space, and he turns around. I avert my eyes, suddenly embarrassed. I hadn’t caught his eye or anything.  It’s just that he wasn’t wearing his mask. And suddenly now for me, it felt like seeing the top lip on someone’s face is too personal a thing. Something for people you know, your bubble, your household. I remember reading in med school about how the cm or so just under your nose is one of the defining features of facial recognition, unique as a fingerprint.  As personal as a nipple? It’s not like people are wearing masks all the time now; just when we’re waiting in huddles, or inside, forced ...

  I’ve stopped asking people if they want to take their placenta home. Dragon boat racing is going well; I missed a couple of weeks, and they missed me too which was incredibly sweet. We do 200m and 600m sprints and I had fallen clearly behind in fitness; struggling to keep up with pace. They’re doing proper coaching now and this week we got advised not to crunch over when we get tired at the end of the races. When we get fatigued, we apparently all curve over like prawns, which mean we make smaller paddle strokes; and our lungs don’t expand properly and we get more tired and inefficient. The advice was simple; head up, look up, watch the people around you and keep same pace as sometimes it has slowed. The boat will run smoother if you put the paddle in in sync with others, even if you can’t paddle as strongly. I got angry in theatre at student midwife that was recording a Caesarian section from start (not just when the baby was coming out). It wasn’t good. Any story that starts wi...

  So I got a week off between night shifts; organised a hire car, and headed off to Cornwall (Kernow); blessed enormously to have hit the road about the same time as the sun came out. The fields and hills were a gentle green and the mist was rising. I got up early and had left at 6am but stupidly left my keys in the door. So 45 min into the adventure I had to do a loop back to Exeter.    I’m going to pretend that that extra travel did me good; getting me used to driving in the UK after literally months without driving at all… As an aside; the company I hired off (Co-cars) is one of those ones where you get given a card and can unlock a car parked on the street. I loved it- a hybrid Corolla, too big for one person but offset by the astounding fuel efficiency (I got 400miles out of 30L of petrol).  Anyway; I hadn’t really planned all that well; and the later start meant I did a lot of driving in the first day, going back and forth around St Austell- I was camping north...