I went junkie spotting today on George Street. Or rather junkie dicking, for if George Street were a spotted dick, the non-junkies would be the spots; the numerically superior junkies the sponge pudding which, by process of elimination, must form the dick. Quite why George Street should be likened to a spotted dick is uncertain; I may well have been stoned when I wrote the above lines earlier today. Because I’m too lazy to hit the backspace key and devise a better introduction however we’ll stick with the spotted dick analogy. So I went junkie dicking today and spotted a few familiar phalluses. Ideally, I would prefer not to be associated with the smacked up underbelly of Aberdeen but unfortunately I have no say in the matter, having been forced to spend the past year locked up with the most nefarious junk-balls ever to hit up in Union T Gardens. Some people have greatness thrust upon them; I have junkies. Being on first-name terms with housebreakers, muggers and granny bashers isn’t something I’m proud of but, like the incestuous uncle you can’t disown, I am resigned to being inexorably linked with these people till death or overdose do us apart.
The first victim was clocked at 20 paces, at which point I didn’t know I knew him but I knew enough to know I didn’t want to know him. Head down, hands thrust deep into otherwise empty pockets, he dodged and weaved his way along George Street, past Farmfoods and all the other insalubrious stores that men of his ilk are apt to shoplift in when strung out and skint. Quite why junkies choose to steal from the scabbiest establishments has always baffled me; given that shoplifting is equally illegal regardless of which shop you plunder, surely it makes sense to aim high when funds are low. If I was a junkie, you wouldn’t catch me sneaking out of Farmfoods with a kilo of frozen peas stuffed down the front of my trackie B’s; I’d be cheeking magnums in the champagne aisle of Selfridges. With the ubiquitous baseball cap pulled down low, the face gaunt and the skin pallid and sore-ridden, there was no doubting that the zombie approaching me was a fully habited up member of the junkie community. It took another 30 paces however for me to recognise the waif that had just flitted past me. I did know this dodger. In fact I had seen him - or a better-kept version of him - just a month ago in the jail. Back then he had been in rude health; now, he may well have been rude but he was about as healthy as my bank balance. As the skank skanked his way down Aberdeen’s skankiest thoroughfare, I wondered to myself what it is about George Street that attracts junkies like flies to faeces. Sure, you see them in Union Terrace Gardens, the Aberdeen Market and the Job Centre, but nowhere - not even in the Sandilands ghetto - do you see them ambling shoulder to shoulder, like the Armies of Darkness marching into the battle for Middle Earth. What is this junkie je na sais quoi that George Street seems to possess; is there a soup kitchen in the vicinity? I doubt it. Besides, even if there was, it’s hardly the sort of liquid nourishment they’re looking for. No, George Street is riddled with junkies for the same reason that King Street is redolent of rotten fish; because it just is, and no amount of rhyme nor reason will provide a logical explanation to this conundrum.
Upon reaching the other end of the scaghead infested street, I encountered another acquaintance from my prison days. This one was hadn’t changed a bit since we last met, but it still took me a moment to place the face. I was passing one of the many barbershops that jostle for position with the pawn and pie shops strewn along George Street when a hairdresser stepped out to spark up a fag. Upon catching sight of me, her face lit up in recognition and she smiled. ‘Hiya, how you doing?’ I looked at her blankly for a moment as I waited for the cogs to turn. A couple of seconds later, it clicked: she used to work as a prisoner escort with Reliance. Out of uniform - or at least out of that uniform - she looked totally different. The last time we had met, I was handcuffed to her and she was holding my trousers up. It was September 9th 2005 and I had just been sentenced to three years imprisonment for perjury. Having been escorted out of the dock flanked by the Reliance guard and her male counterpart, I was led to the High Court holding cells where I was relieved of my belt lest I try to hang myself with it. And so it was that I found myself being hauled out of the courthouse to the waiting Reliance van while handcuffed to a woman old enough to be my mum, my left arm chained to her right, the other working in conjunction with hers to stop my trousers from rendezvousing with my ankles as we passed the waiting paparazzi. (OK, so it was only two fotographers from the local press, but paparazzi sounds more glamorous.)
As I chatted with the Reliance guard-cum-hairdresser I had once formed an unbreakable bond with, I was struck by the incongruity of the roles we are sometimes obliged to play out in life. Back then, she had been the jailer, while I was the convicted prisoner, not because either of us wanted to assume those parts but because the cost of living and the law respectively had demanded that we do so. Now, 14 months on, a lot had changed. She was now a hairdresser, no longer obliged to haul me about like a dog on a lead, while I…well, I guess I was still the convicted criminal but at least I was now free to walk the streets and add to my criminal convictions should I so desire.
Some time later, without further encountering former acquaintances, I reached my ultimate destination - the hospital. Unlike previous hospital visitations that have found their way into my weblog, this one wasn’t to donate sperm. Rather, I had an out-patient appointment in regard to an operation that was performed some years ago. (I’m pleased to report that the implanted breasts are working perfectly. All three of them.) To be honest, I’m not sure if I even needed a check-up, but I had requested one a year previously while in jail, reasoning that if nothing else, it would provide me with a day out. In true NHS style though, they had prevaricated until a five-minute appointment had become a year-long debacle. My first scheduled appointment was cancelled because the details were mailed to me instead of to the prison management. Apparently, foreknowledge of my hospital appointment was forbidden lest I use the excursion to plan an escape or - even more heinously - score a parcel. And so it was that the prison staff cancelled my appointment and scheduled a new one for a mystery day and hour, known only to them and Almighty God. By the time the elusive date with dentistry came around, today, I was out of jail and deemed suitably mature to attend my own hospital appointment without a Reliance escort. With the incentive of a day out from the prison now removed, I couldn’t really be bothered attending and when I found out that the clinic was running an hour late, I certainly couldn’t be bothered staying. However I felt guilt-tripped into remaining in situ by a notice in the waiting room declaring that missed appointments had cost the hospital £1.5million in the last year. That money could have been used to fund the NHS computerisation programme for at least another five minutes.
As I climbed the stairs to the maxilofacial department, the same stairs I have traversed annually for the past 14 years, I passed a floor signposted The Infection Unit. It seemed odd to single out one specific section as being reserved for infection given that the entire hospital was crawling with MRSA. Whether the unit’s purpose was to contain infection or to spread it was unclear. Are visitors to The Infection Unit obliged to wear surgical masks to contain their germs or are they required to cough profusely to spread the bug around? I have always hated visiting hospital visits, as both a patient and a well wisher. Traversing those endless corridors wracked with trolley processions of the sick, the geriatric, the forgotten and the dying, I’ve always wondered why so much resources are expended on keeping these people alive. It’s blatantly obvious that these service users - to give the walking dead their PC designation - lost the will to live a long time ago, around the same time that their families lost the will to care for them. The Nazis might have been, well, Nazis but they had the right idea with their policy on euthanasia. Apparently, local councils in Britain use a formula to determine the value of each life lost on the roads, taking into account variables such as the cost of the emergency services, hospital treatment and life insurance. They then use this figure as a threshold to determine whether improvements should be made to accident black spots. The current price of a motorist’s life is £1.5million. If you want the dirt track leading to your house tarmacked, run a few people over on it and the council will be obliged to resurface it. I can’t help wondering if the same policy might work for hospitals. If all these corpses-in-waiting have to look forward to is another two years of Murder She Wrote and shitting into a colostomy bag, is it worth treating them? They’re nothing but a drain on society, and cantankerous, valetudinarian ones at that. Mind you, perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to condemn the condemned for as a convicted criminal, unemployed and unemployable, I wonder what my value to society would be? Probably the equivalent of the loose change in the George Street junkie’s pockets. Judge not lest ye be judged deserving of premature termination.
The first victim was clocked at 20 paces, at which point I didn’t know I knew him but I knew enough to know I didn’t want to know him. Head down, hands thrust deep into otherwise empty pockets, he dodged and weaved his way along George Street, past Farmfoods and all the other insalubrious stores that men of his ilk are apt to shoplift in when strung out and skint. Quite why junkies choose to steal from the scabbiest establishments has always baffled me; given that shoplifting is equally illegal regardless of which shop you plunder, surely it makes sense to aim high when funds are low. If I was a junkie, you wouldn’t catch me sneaking out of Farmfoods with a kilo of frozen peas stuffed down the front of my trackie B’s; I’d be cheeking magnums in the champagne aisle of Selfridges. With the ubiquitous baseball cap pulled down low, the face gaunt and the skin pallid and sore-ridden, there was no doubting that the zombie approaching me was a fully habited up member of the junkie community. It took another 30 paces however for me to recognise the waif that had just flitted past me. I did know this dodger. In fact I had seen him - or a better-kept version of him - just a month ago in the jail. Back then he had been in rude health; now, he may well have been rude but he was about as healthy as my bank balance. As the skank skanked his way down Aberdeen’s skankiest thoroughfare, I wondered to myself what it is about George Street that attracts junkies like flies to faeces. Sure, you see them in Union Terrace Gardens, the Aberdeen Market and the Job Centre, but nowhere - not even in the Sandilands ghetto - do you see them ambling shoulder to shoulder, like the Armies of Darkness marching into the battle for Middle Earth. What is this junkie je na sais quoi that George Street seems to possess; is there a soup kitchen in the vicinity? I doubt it. Besides, even if there was, it’s hardly the sort of liquid nourishment they’re looking for. No, George Street is riddled with junkies for the same reason that King Street is redolent of rotten fish; because it just is, and no amount of rhyme nor reason will provide a logical explanation to this conundrum.
Upon reaching the other end of the scaghead infested street, I encountered another acquaintance from my prison days. This one was hadn’t changed a bit since we last met, but it still took me a moment to place the face. I was passing one of the many barbershops that jostle for position with the pawn and pie shops strewn along George Street when a hairdresser stepped out to spark up a fag. Upon catching sight of me, her face lit up in recognition and she smiled. ‘Hiya, how you doing?’ I looked at her blankly for a moment as I waited for the cogs to turn. A couple of seconds later, it clicked: she used to work as a prisoner escort with Reliance. Out of uniform - or at least out of that uniform - she looked totally different. The last time we had met, I was handcuffed to her and she was holding my trousers up. It was September 9th 2005 and I had just been sentenced to three years imprisonment for perjury. Having been escorted out of the dock flanked by the Reliance guard and her male counterpart, I was led to the High Court holding cells where I was relieved of my belt lest I try to hang myself with it. And so it was that I found myself being hauled out of the courthouse to the waiting Reliance van while handcuffed to a woman old enough to be my mum, my left arm chained to her right, the other working in conjunction with hers to stop my trousers from rendezvousing with my ankles as we passed the waiting paparazzi. (OK, so it was only two fotographers from the local press, but paparazzi sounds more glamorous.)
As I chatted with the Reliance guard-cum-hairdresser I had once formed an unbreakable bond with, I was struck by the incongruity of the roles we are sometimes obliged to play out in life. Back then, she had been the jailer, while I was the convicted prisoner, not because either of us wanted to assume those parts but because the cost of living and the law respectively had demanded that we do so. Now, 14 months on, a lot had changed. She was now a hairdresser, no longer obliged to haul me about like a dog on a lead, while I…well, I guess I was still the convicted criminal but at least I was now free to walk the streets and add to my criminal convictions should I so desire.
Some time later, without further encountering former acquaintances, I reached my ultimate destination - the hospital. Unlike previous hospital visitations that have found their way into my weblog, this one wasn’t to donate sperm. Rather, I had an out-patient appointment in regard to an operation that was performed some years ago. (I’m pleased to report that the implanted breasts are working perfectly. All three of them.) To be honest, I’m not sure if I even needed a check-up, but I had requested one a year previously while in jail, reasoning that if nothing else, it would provide me with a day out. In true NHS style though, they had prevaricated until a five-minute appointment had become a year-long debacle. My first scheduled appointment was cancelled because the details were mailed to me instead of to the prison management. Apparently, foreknowledge of my hospital appointment was forbidden lest I use the excursion to plan an escape or - even more heinously - score a parcel. And so it was that the prison staff cancelled my appointment and scheduled a new one for a mystery day and hour, known only to them and Almighty God. By the time the elusive date with dentistry came around, today, I was out of jail and deemed suitably mature to attend my own hospital appointment without a Reliance escort. With the incentive of a day out from the prison now removed, I couldn’t really be bothered attending and when I found out that the clinic was running an hour late, I certainly couldn’t be bothered staying. However I felt guilt-tripped into remaining in situ by a notice in the waiting room declaring that missed appointments had cost the hospital £1.5million in the last year. That money could have been used to fund the NHS computerisation programme for at least another five minutes.
As I climbed the stairs to the maxilofacial department, the same stairs I have traversed annually for the past 14 years, I passed a floor signposted The Infection Unit. It seemed odd to single out one specific section as being reserved for infection given that the entire hospital was crawling with MRSA. Whether the unit’s purpose was to contain infection or to spread it was unclear. Are visitors to The Infection Unit obliged to wear surgical masks to contain their germs or are they required to cough profusely to spread the bug around? I have always hated visiting hospital visits, as both a patient and a well wisher. Traversing those endless corridors wracked with trolley processions of the sick, the geriatric, the forgotten and the dying, I’ve always wondered why so much resources are expended on keeping these people alive. It’s blatantly obvious that these service users - to give the walking dead their PC designation - lost the will to live a long time ago, around the same time that their families lost the will to care for them. The Nazis might have been, well, Nazis but they had the right idea with their policy on euthanasia. Apparently, local councils in Britain use a formula to determine the value of each life lost on the roads, taking into account variables such as the cost of the emergency services, hospital treatment and life insurance. They then use this figure as a threshold to determine whether improvements should be made to accident black spots. The current price of a motorist’s life is £1.5million. If you want the dirt track leading to your house tarmacked, run a few people over on it and the council will be obliged to resurface it. I can’t help wondering if the same policy might work for hospitals. If all these corpses-in-waiting have to look forward to is another two years of Murder She Wrote and shitting into a colostomy bag, is it worth treating them? They’re nothing but a drain on society, and cantankerous, valetudinarian ones at that. Mind you, perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to condemn the condemned for as a convicted criminal, unemployed and unemployable, I wonder what my value to society would be? Probably the equivalent of the loose change in the George Street junkie’s pockets. Judge not lest ye be judged deserving of premature termination.
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