Eye say

Alicia had an appointment for a checkup at the eye clinic this morning. Twenty past nine was the time on the card, so I strong armed her out of the house just after twenty past eight - that gave us an hour, plenty of time for a journey that was not much more than five miles, at least in theory.

I was expecting the ring road to be slow, but we were stationary for what seemed like ages, until the traffic suddenly cleared somewhere just past Hillsborough and started moving freely. Although it is a nice wide, straight bit of duel carriageway the speed limit is 30mph and I was being careful because I usually am, and also there are speed cameras and police along that stretch. Any fans of the Traffic Cops programmes will recognize the bit I am talking about, that gives the chavs a chance to pick up a bit of speed in their stolen XR3is. Consequently, I picked up a taxi travelling right behind me as the road turned to head up to the university. There are a series of four or five traffic lights one after the other, and I could see them starting to change just as I was passing the first of them. I knew I wasn't going to get past the last one before it turned red so I put the brakes on, and being ABS and new they are pretty damned efficient. Needless to say, the taxi driver came within a whisker of running into the back of me, and he looked a little, shall we say, perturbed that I hadn't just run the red light. Hmmm. At least when the lights changed to green I was able to demonstrate that my car accelerates even more efficiently than it brakes ... :-)

We got to the hospital at around five past nine, but the direct route to the car park had a no right turn, so we had to do a loop and come back along a service road through the middle of the hospital campus. It was stationary. We crawled along at a snail's pace until we came to the road heading back down to the car park, which was similarly stationary and nobody looked like they were going anywhere. I nipped round the corner and spotted a gap in the queue for the car park and snuck in at 9:19 exactly.

Fortunately the Opthamology department is exactly opposite the car park, so we got in bang on time, to find that at least four other people were booked for exactly the same time with the same consultant. How much did you say the NHS is spending on IT, exactly?

Anyway, we got seen eventually, and it turns out that the nerves at the back of Alicia's eyes are fine, just a little bunched together because she is so short sighted, and we were out after five minutes with the consultant. Shame that they couldn't look at my eyes at the same time, so I'll have to do the same trip when I get my appointment at the clinic to get my retinas examined.