Walk this way

I turned up on time at the cardiology department, and was swiftly whisked into a small room for the ECG, which involved several people with very cold hands putting sticky patches on various parts of my anatomy ("top off please"), wiring me up to a machine that went 'ping' then before I knew it, whipping them off again ("top on again thank you"), then out into the corridor again. No sooner had I got my book out to calm down a little than I was called into another small room full of people and machines that go 'flub-dub', ("top off please"), had my chest covered in gloop and an echo-gram thing done and various measurements taken. It was at this point that the consultant came in and said hello. Nice. Then I was handed some scratchy paper to mop up the gloop ("top on again thank you") and sent back to the waiting room. Then the consultant reappeared and I was ushered into yet another room to discuss my symptoms. Which he didn't seem to believe any of, sent me into the side room ("top off please"), used his stethoscope and took my blood pressure ("That's quite high but I expect you're not very relaxed but your pulse is slow so that's good top on again thank you") and that was it. Apart from being positioned slightly lower than they expected - from a certain age everything's lower than it used to be - they couldn't find anything wrong with my heart, which is good, but I left feeling like a complete fraud and a twit and a waster-of-everyone's-time. I knew I should have cancelled.

And Ned's sulking because it usually takes a good meal and a nice bottle of wine to get my top off.