"Life's a bitch."
Sorry to hear that the situation is so bad over there, and that the your parents are having great difficulties; I am amazed that people somehow seem to find reserves of strength when times get very tough.
Things are, as you might expect, very quiet and stable in Bury St Edmunds. My wife and I have just cycled into town to pick up a prescription and found 3 police cars with a van in front of the chemist. My first thought was that it was a robbery (already today, staff at the our local Tesco Express had been robbed at knifepoint) but when I saw two coppers returning to M&S with a partially empty wine bottle, I inferred that a wino had been caught while slaking their thirst. My wife related that in the chemist, she'd had to wait as a druggie collected his clean needles and medical wipes. She reckoned that she could have done with those wipes.
This morning's trip into town was to call at the solicitors and return the contracts for re-hashing our wills - yes! Cycling back, we came across our first doctor when we'd moved to Bury - the delightful, bumbling chap who, 40 years ago, had confirmed that my wife was pregnant. He was out walking with his wife and he is just as charming, a bit more bumbling and harder of hearing - not surprising as he must now be in his 80s. Seeing him reminded me that science certainly does not have explanations for everything.
Over 40 years ago, I had consulted this doctor about a massive verruca on my big toe; there was a collection of smaller verrucas around it that extended onto neighbouring toes. A few days later, I turned up to have the verruca cut out. After some sort of local anaesthetic, I could feel the scraping and I could see the nurse grimacing; then there was the smell of burning flesh as he cauterised it.
The doc left the room and the nurse asked if it hurt - it didn't at the time as it was still anaesthetised, but I pulled up my foot to see this still-smouldering crater about a half-inch across. I put it to the doc - 'Great, that's got the big one, but what about the rest?' He replied that 'once they got the big one - it frightened the rest off'. And sure enough, over a few days, the others all disappeared; I was amazed.
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