Discharged!

Good, good news! No more Warfarin! I've been taking it for six months since I developed a clot in my right leg in April, probably due to a return flight we took to Rome. My leg swelled with an excruciating pain. My GP sent me immediately to hospital where I had an ultrasound scan and a DVT was confirmed.

Question: why is this known as a "deep vein thrombosis" in everyday parlance, but is referred to as "deep venous thrombosis" in the medical books? Anyway, it's goodbye to regular blood tests and rat poison. I was always surprised at how busy the hospital anti-coagulant clinic was. Why were there so many people with problems of the blood?

Thank you National Health Service!

I've just received in the post a book called "Obsolete - An encyclopedia of once-common things passing us by" by Anna Jane Grossman. It is what it says it is: a list of things which have been rendered passé by, mainly, technological innovation. 

I saw the book last week in a store in Berkeley, California, where we had gone to try and recapture the heady sixties vibe of counter-culture and revolution. We didn't find it -  it's disappeared from the streets of downtown Berkeley, and the college campus, anyhow. Anti-war protest is probably now a web-based movement, exploiting the same technologies which have given rise to the changes mapped in Ms Grossman's book. Well, the real point I'm making is that I couldn't afford the book when I saw it (sorry, Moe) and had to wait until I got home to order it from Amazon. And this is one of the obsolete phenomena that Ms Grossman doesn't chronicle: the once endless wait to receive a book that one had ordered from one's friendly local bookstore. 

In the sixties and seventies ordering a book was like this: you told the bookseller the author and title of the book you wanted. The bookseller then checked through the bulky tomes called "British Books in Print" (these later existed in a microfiche version, proving that the technology of information storage was already downscaling). Then he/she filled in an order form and gave you a carbon copy with the promise "That should take x weeks". We'll send you a card when it's in.

And you waited, and waited and waited....

You knew that the book physically existed somewhere in a warehouse in the British Isles, but there didn't seem to be any direct link between that paper order slip and the act of retrieving the book from the shelves of said warehouse.

And you waited, and waited and waited. Eventually, if you found yourself in town with nothing better to do, you might call into the bookshop and breathlessly ask if the book had arrived. Of course, there were two possibilities: it hadn't yet come, or it had arrived several weeks ago but the shop had forgotten to send you the card they had promised....

Note: Read David Lodge's novel "Changing Places" for an English academic's view of the University of California at Berkeley as a hotbed of countercultural action in the sixties.