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!

According to the weather widget on my iPhone, the ambient temperature this afternoon will rise to 39 deg C (102 deg F). I’ve been to some hot places in my time – Southern Spain, North Africa, India and Egypt, among others – but never thought to encounter heat like this in the UK. Not only is it uncomfortable to be out in the streets and on public transport but it is also rather frightening, at least, I think so.

Many people thought – and I admit that I was one of them – that the effects of climate change would appear gradually and that our generation would be dead and gone by the time life started to become impossible. The current hot spell suggests that we were over-confident and that the world is heading towards disaster faster than we dared to hope.

There are two ways by which I can go to meet Tigger from work. The first is the quick way by taking two tube trains and a 10 minute walk. As well as the walk through hot streets there are two staircases to climb, of 28 and 37 steps respectively. It doesn’t sound much and, for a young person, it isn’t much, but for a gentleman of, shall we say mature, years, it is something I would prefer to avoid, at least in this heat. The second way is to take two buses which deliver me virtually to the door. Apart from the discomfort of the bus rides (the air-conditioning fitted to London buses has negligeable effect in this weather) it is a better way to travel.

Often on the way home we stop off for coffee but during the heatwave we have come straight home to sit or lie in the breeze from our electric fans.

Walking in the street under the baleful glare of the sun, I find myself ever and anon humming the tune of the old burlesque song, Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. How long will it be before London city gents adopt a style of topee and military cut kakhi shorts?

Each weekday morning after breakfast I solve a Sudoku puzzle. The one shown below appeared in City AM, a free newspaper distributed each morning on Monday to Friday. Tigger picks one up for me on her way to work.

Why do I solve Sudoku puzzles? Firstly because I like doing them. I have a logical mind that delights in puzzles that can be solved by logic as opposed to, say, crossword puzzles that rely on knowledge and a more general kind of cleverness.

Another reason is because I believe it helps keep my mind active and stave off the brain deterioration of old age. Or rather, I did believe that until I read an article that cast doubt on this comforting idea. Now I’m not so sure but I do the Sudoku anyway.

Having a logical mind makes me interested in mathematics. Unfortunately, I was bad at the subject in school. I had to retake the GCE O Level examination and scraped through on the second try. Yet I liked maths and tried to improve my knowledge by study from books.

One day I decided to bite the bullet and enrol for A Level evening classes. I started attending with some trepidation in view of my previous maths experience but in fact had no trouble at all. I passed the A Level exam with an A grade.

This inspired me to apply for a degree course at Birkbeck College (University of London) where you can study part-time in the evening.

While studying maths, I was also working full time as a lecturer at a polytechnic. The university course was much more demanding of time as well as effort than the A Level course and it proved impossible to cope with both the maths and my job. After one term, I regretfully left the course.

Having a logical mind is both a blessing and a curse. If a problem can be solved logically, then it’s a blessing but otherwise, it’s the opposite. Tigger is much more intuitive and often solves problems in a twinkling of an eye that leave me floundering.

An example is choosing between equally good possibilities. On a Saturday, for example, Tigger might ask “Where do you want to go today?” Happily, she has learnt not to wait for an answer as otherwise we would never start out!

Decisions are a particular bugbear of mine so it’s just as well that there is someone in my life to help me make them!

Walking up St John Street, Islington, on my way back from the library, I noticed that this pub has changed its name to Dame Alice Owen. It has had several previous names, the last I remember being the Blacksmith and Toffee Maker.

The halcyon era of the traditional pub, which some of us still remember, is long gone, what with the public’s changing tastes, the smoking ban and cheap supermarket beer. Many once successful pubs are struggling to survive or have closed down altogether. The remainder are having to re-invent themselves to find new ways of attracting customers.

I have never visited this pub so I cannot say how successful it is or how likely to survive in the short or long term. Time, as they say, will tell.

Dame Alice, incidentally, was a local philanthropist living from 1547 to 1613. She is remembered today mainly for the school that bears her name but she did other good works including founding almshouses.

A curious tale relates how plain Alice, as she was then, was walking in Islington fields when she stopped to try her hand at milking a cow. As she rose from her milking, an arrow, shot by one of the archers practising nearby, pierced her hat, luckily causing her no injury. This fortunate escape seems to have inspired her to engage in good works. It is also said that the archer later married her but only as husband number three.

For the purposes of this blog I will refer to myself as SilverTiger. I live in North London with my partner whom I shall call Tigger. She will play a part in my posts as she is a very important and beloved part of my life.

I do not promise to update this blog regularly but only when I feel moved to do so. It is a blog about our daily lives, including our outings and travels and it will be simple in style and content. You are welcome to read what I write and to leave comments if you wish to do so. I may add an email contact address later if it seems to good idea to do so.

My intention is to write my posts “on the hoof”, that is, during the day while I am engaged in the activities described or in the evening when I have time to look back over the day and reflect on what I have been doing.

Sometimes I will add photos to illustrate my posts. These photos will normally be taken with the camera on my Apple iPhone 6. Any editing will usually be done with the few editing facilities available on the phone. This probably means that they will not be very good photos though I hope they will still be worth the bother.

I will compose my posts using the WordPress app. available for the iPhone. This is the most direct way of working. It also means that there will be no fancy formatting of my posts though if there is need to do so, I can post-edit an article on my PC.

If you have any questions or observations, please write them in a comment. Comments are not moderated and will appear straightaway but I reserve the right to delete spam and any other comments I find objectionable.