I spent the afternoon in A&E with Number One Grandson who fell down a flight of stone stairs yesterday and hit his funny-bone (it gives me a pain just thinking about it!) By today the elbow was nicely swollen, hence the trip in to the NHS House of Horrors, (minus, unfortunately, House). The waiting room was empty but we still sat for long enough to get cricks in our necks watching afternoon TV. I suppose they put the screen that high to be out of the way of drunks and injured giraffes. Iain joined us, dragging his chest drain bottle, to help pass the time both for him and for us.

He is, by now, the hospital's most senior patient having just passed his 8 day training period. A few days more and he will be appointed Matron. He knows all the doctors and consultants by their first names, is especially matey with those who go up to the roof to smoke, and has managed to organise himself a steady supply of vodka and orange disguised as Innocent Smoothie.

 The results of the x-rays of Sandy's elbow were inconclusive because the radiologist has gone AWOL until after the weekend. The nice triage nurse told us she thought he had a fracture but we shall have to wait until Monday to find out. After a while she came back and retracted the bit about a fracture because she isn't an expert. Sandy was given a natty little sling and we were sent home, leaving poor Iain mooching morosely around the car park in his slippers, smoking an evil looking rolly in black liquorice paper.

 We are buying a copy of 'Plumbing for Idiots' for him to leave behind when he finally escapes. We will helpfully highlight the passage on one-way valves. The junior doctors don't seem to have fully grasped the principles. Iain's lung was deflating at night to the point where he swore he could feel it flapping around inside his chest. It re-inflated in the day time when he was conscious and could seal the tube - rather like that Dutch boy who stood with his finger in the dyke. The hissing sound coming from the misaligned valve should have given the highly trained medical staff a clue to what was going wrong but possibly no-one wanted to blame their colleagues for cocking up.