I had an appointment this morning at the Clinic for Infectious Diseases. It’s not as bad as it sounds. My doctor sent me here because my left leg, which had swelled up as the result of a serious infection in early May, was still red and swollen. She thought there might still be a lurking infection.

To cut a long story short, the doctor detected no ongoing infection and reassured me that my “lower left extremity”, as they like to call it, will regain its original svelteness in due course. He also prescribed a cream to be applied twice a day for two weeks.

“Pop down to the pharmacy in the basement and pick it up,” he said before politely showing me the door.

Now, if you are not from the UK, you may need me to explain how our National Health Service operates in order to understand what follows. The NHS is a wonderful institution and I won’t hear a word against it. Many a time I have fallen ill and the NHS has taken care of me with kindness and great consideration for my well-being. And all this, of course, without such a thing as fees or emoluments being so much as mentioned. However, the NHS, being a national facility, is underfunded, understaffed and overworked. The most palpable sign of this is waiting times. You can wait weeks for an appointment and when you turn up for it you may be seen at the appointment time or an hour or more later. Those of us who have frequent recourse to the NHS expect to wait and we put up with it with good grace knowing that it is not owing to any lack of goodwill on the part of the doctors, nurses and administrators. They are doing the best they can with the resources at their disposal.

So I popped or, rather, took the lift to the basement and sought out the pharmacy. This turned out to be a smallish facility with just two “hatches”, as the call the windows where you communicate with the staff within. Both hatches were occupied, naturally, so I waited my turn. When this came, I said I had been sent to collect a prescription. I was asked for my name and date of birth, handed a numbered ticket (969)and then informed that it would take 30 minutes.

I found a seat in the small waiting room. This did not have a very good view of the hatches and I wondered how I would know when to collect my prescription. There was no illuminated number board as in the pharmacy at University College Hospital. Would they call my name? Or my number?

In the meantime I decided to while away the time writing this blog post on my phone. And it is just as well that I did keep my phone in my hand because suddenly, to my surprise, I received an email. I was surprised because down here in the basement there is no mobile signal and no wifi. How the email wended its way to me I do not know. What the email said was “Your prescription is ready”! I made my way to one of the hatches ans duly received the goods.

This was rendered all the more ironic because of a notice that I saw pasted to the wall of the waiting room:

Most institutions, when they install a new computer system, tell you how much more efficient they will be as a result and how much faster the service will be. Not the NHS, though.

Trust the NHS to tell it like it is!