So, after drinking two pints of ‘thistle’ (builders and plasterers will get the reference), having my arse filled once with a concrete tank trap from WWII, and once with the same tank trap, but which had been made during the winter so that the sun had not had time to cure it to its optimum hardness, I got the call to go back to see the consulltant gastropub bloke.
We looked at the pictures – some of them were even animated! Fuck me, they really are getting to grips with technology, I mean Max Fleischer only began his animation career in 1915 – and he talked about reflux and emptying until my eyes began to glaze over. My poor fucking clients – I’ve seen that look in their eyes when I’ve attempted to explain to them how their corporate network was hacked and what rules they needed to write on their routers to both log the illegal activity and to stop it from nicking their customer database (never did tell any of them that it was probably their own emloyees simply copying the company database to a CD or DVD during their lunch break, but at least it ensured that I’d get called back when they discovered a competitor had suddenly sold the same shit to all their customers for 10 cents on the dollar cheaper – fuck off, don’t get all moral with me: I had a mortgage for Christ’s sake. And take a look at how much the Government are ripping YOU off every day. I was just doing my bit).
Gastrowhitecoatbloke ended saying that he thought a closer look was obviously in order. I know the boy geek with the pink cement was a stunted, weasley little fucker, but I didn’t relish the thought of him sticking his head down my throat to get a better look. He could try and stick it up my arse if he wanted: at least my daily bowel routine had had the good sense to return to normal so I could arrange an early appointment and see how HE liked drinking shit for a change.
However, it seemed that I was to be denied that slightly weird pleasure: whitecoat said I need a CT. What, I’ve got to go to Connecticut? To do what? Or worse, to have what done? I’ve been to America a few times, and each time I found it distinctly fucking odd.
The first time was when I had the big company in West London and was earning some proper money – until my finance director and the director from the marketing company we used nicked fucking millions of quid from it and I was arrested by the SFO on suspicion of nicking 47 million quid! I spent 5 years on bail, 17 months on trial, was acquitted of the five charges of conspiracy brought against me and even had to fight for two years to be reimbursed for my travel costs to court every day. Needless to say the company closed just days before we were due to float it on NASDAQ and make fucking millions and millions of pounds FUCKING LEGALLY! Bastards!
Sorry… still a bit bitter about that: Anne Marie and I lost almost everything, one honest bloke almost lost his life, but had the good sense to recognise it and fucked off to sell grocery door to door or something to keep out of the grips of our English version of Men in Black. Oh, we have them dear, cynical reader, we have them. I could tell you some stuff that would make your pubes straight, but for the moment, you’re stuck with stories about my arse, my insides and how the NHS make you fucking ill. Maybe one day, that story will get published, but after years of having my phone tapped, my mail intercepted and even all my emails being intercepted means I can’t tell it. Yet 
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So I’m sitting at my desk, watching the pounds roll in to the company, in real time, bored shitless. I’d spent two years designing a piece of technology which would revolutionise one particular aspect of the communicatons industry, almost brought AM and I to bankruptcy doing it at the time, but managed to raise the million quid to get it built, and was now the head of a plc NOT doing what I do best. I had a PA who fielded my calls, a team of techies to look after everything, and I was rolled out once a year to head up the shareholders meetings. So when Phil (you remember him: fat bloke with a dodgy sense of humour – we used to race motorbikes together as well as being a part of the Sunday Morning Sussex Bikers, 20 or 30 of whom used to scare the crap out of the cage drivers at 7 am on Sunday mornings around the twisties in Sussex until we both realised it was stupid and dangerous and pretty well stopped doing it) phoned me one day to ask if I fancied riding a dirt bike across the Nevada desert, as well as going up and down a few mountains, it took about half a nanosecond to ask when were we going to leave.
It was a hoot; we even hired a couple of Harleys in Reno a few days before the madness was due to begin and took the piss out of the yanks riding their chrome plated sofas. Phil even took his off road… fucking nutter! But the Murricans were nothing less than weird. At one point I swear I heard ‘Duelling Banjos’ playing while we stopped to talk to come locals (locals? We were about 300 miles from the nearest mobile phone mast, let alone a real town), one of whom looked like the bloke from the movie with the banjo: one strap dungarees and chewing and spitting tobacco. During the ride, we stopped off at a town – I swear it had a wooden sign at the dirt track entrance bearing the legend ‘Luning. Population 48′. But the 48 had a line through it in what looked like dried blood and a charcoal 47 scawled below. Getting pissed with the rednecks that night (the sign on the shack that doubled as a bar, read ‘We’re rednecks – We carry guns’) I asked how they got on in these isolated towns without a police presence if anyone causes trouble or commits a crime. Big guy, who fortunately had a lazy eye and had not spotted I had a pony tail (instant death around those parts), took an impressive slug of what I assumed was proper moonshine, a mouthful of bottled beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, spat at one of the two hell hounds kept in a cage naxt to a truly horrifying little place that masqueraded as a ‘gents’ and drawled: “Hell, boy, we shoot ‘em and bury ‘em in the desert”. Not, you will have noticed “We would” but “We shoot ‘em”. Didn’t matter how good at Kung Fu I was, I was genuinely terrified and bought them all a drink.
However, and fortunately, I didn’t have to go back to the US of A: CT stands for computed tomography, which is a fancy term for something about halfway between an X-ray and an MRI scan, and does not involve anything remotely messy. Thank fuck.
I got the appointment and the usual leaflet explaining what each part was and what each part did a la ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ (if you don’t get the reference, then thank your lucky stars that you ain’t even close to my age) and was informed that I was not to eat or drink anything for at least eight hours before the scan. The scan was booked for early morning, so I even had to forego my singular shot of caffeine, but did at least smoke all the way there.
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that not only did I not have to drink any gloop this time, I didn’t even have to wear the gown! The scan goes right through clothes! 20 seconds on a table and it was all over; I was almost disappointed. Yeah, right.
However, this was only the picture taking, the producer had yet to cast his eye upon it….