Allendale

To my great satisfaction, I was one of the lucky few final years who managed to bag a rural GP placement. Mine was in Allendale, a little town just beyond Hexham in the wonderful Northumberland countryside. Having hated every minute of my third year GP placement and become absolutely adamant that general practice was the most unrewarding career choice I could possibly make, I really didn’t hold high hopes for my enjoyment of the upcoming three weeks. However, I was initially pleasantly surprised by a lovely evening drive through the countryside and the fact that I had my own very cosy little holiday cottage to stay in, complete with central heating and stunning valley views, courtesy of the medical school! I counted myself quite lucky in this respect, as some houses in the area have neither electricity nor running water, and knowing the medical school they would probably have loved to put me in one of those.

The (very bumpy and gravelly) road to the cottage

I was even more pleasantly surprised on the drive in for my first day, when I noted that Allendale had a bank, a post office, a Co-op and just the right number of pubs (i.e. rather more than are really necessary). I had been under the impression that it was a really small village like the one I’m from – Misson in South Yorkshire – which has only two pubs and an (admittedly very high quality) cash and carry. The surgery was a small building next to the school, and everyone was extremely helpful in showing me where things were and how the computers worked. There were two GPs, one full-time and one part-time, both of whom were wonderful, caring and extremely competent doctors who knew their patients well and actually seemed to care what happened to them – a breath of fresh air after my third year placement! The practice also had a complement of other healthcare workers including a practice nurse, district nurses, HCAs, health visitors, physiotherapy, community midwifery, podiatry, a dietician and a CPN, all of whom were totally fabulous and helped make my placement engaging and enjoyable.

I had a brilliant time: I was encouraged to get involved as much as possible, and for the last two weeks I had my own clinics with my own patients. I diagnosed several cases of anxiety and depression, some slipped discs, a hernia and various minor joint issues; dealt with a few newly diagnosed hypertensives; spotted a first presentation of Parkinson’s disease in a lady presenting with leg weakness; sent a guy to hospital after he had a TIA; reassured the worried well; gave copious amounts of contraceptive advice; showed a whole primary school class around the surgery; learned when and how to prescribe; wrote referral letters; and gained a much greater understanding of the potential impact of the upcoming NHS reforms (it’s scary how little anyone – even the people in charge of the money who are meant to be designing the new funding system – knows about what’s going on). Not once during my placement did a patient come in demanding antibiotics (or any other kind of treatment) or trying to wheedle a sick note or benefit form out of the doctor. I now see general practice as a potential career choice – especially in the setting of a lovely little village – although I definitely still want to work in a hospital specialty at the moment!

Anyway, enough waffling about how lovely my GP placement was, the main point of this post was to share some of the cool pictures I took of the scenery while I was there. The landscapes were beautiful and looked amazing in the October heatwave sunshine! The sunset at the bottom is my favourite though, it looked like the whole sky was on fire when it was happening. Most of these are panoramas again, so you can click to enlarge them to see things in better detail. Like the last lot these were taken on my Nikon Coolpix S3100.

View from the bottom of the garden - I ballsed this one up a bit but you get the idea of how pretty it was!

Hills in the sunshine

Dramatic sky and dark green fields

A field of fluffy silver thistles

The workload was tough in rural GP land...

This is what you see if you lie on the grass in the evening and look at the sky

Amazing fiery sunset over the valley (click to enlarge)

Hope you all liked the pictures – I have a couple more posts in the pipeline so hopefully it won’t be another two months before I post again!

From pitch-side seats to the top of the world

Saturday 30th July – Aussie Rules

One thing I definitely HAD to do whilst in Australia was to watch (and try to understand) a game of Aussie Rules football. Thankfully the Gold Coast Suns play at the stadium just down the road, and their last game of the season was on Saturday against St Kilda. Tickets were cheap as chips, so me, John, Phoebe and their friend Will snapped up some pitch-side “silver” seating.

Before the match, we ate some lovely spag bol, and me and Phoebe had a civilised glass of wine (I wanted to be able to concentrate on the game!) whilst John and Will had a rather large number of tequila slammers. The stadium was just down the street so we walked there, with John and Will carrying a cheeky bottle of beer for the road. John managed to be quite impressively discreet with his bottle – you get a $100 on-the-spot fine for carring alcohol in public – but Will managed to be less so: he ran home for his lighter, got halfway back to us before running back again convinced he’d “left his beer on the roof” (John and Phoebe live in a ground floor apartment, and his beer was with us), then got a bit hot and sweaty running back to us the second time so took his shirt off to cool down whilst sprinting slightly drunkenly down the main road. Having refused to put his shirt back on and retrieved his lost beer from John, he began drinking it in full view of the police across the road, who didn’t hesitate in coming over. John managed to successfully hide his beer just in time, but Will fell victim to the immortal police trick of “Could you pick up your bottle that you’ve just left on the floor, sir?” – needless to say he got a fine!

Anyway, after all that kerfuffle we arrived at Metricon Stadium and, after some minor stressing, found our seats, which were right at the side of the pitch! It was all very exciting: the ball even landed on me while the players were warming up!

Metricon Stadium - it's quite big

Before I go on I should probably try to briefly explain how a game of Aussie rules works. It’s played on a cricket pitch with a rugby ball, and each game has four quarters lasting 20 minutes plus stoppage time. Each team has 18 players who can be anywhere on the field at any time. The game starts when the umpire does a “centre bounce” with the ball – basically he just throws it at the ground really hard so it bounces unpredictably into the air – or, on the rare occasions that it’s raining, simply throws it into the air. Players can pass the ball in any direction by kicking, punching or slapping it, but they aren’t allowed to throw it. If a player catches the ball when it has travelled more than 15 metres from another player’s kick – this is called a “mark” – they get a choice of taking a free kick or playing on immediately. Whilst running with the ball players have to bounce it off the ground every 15 metres or so. If they are tackled they must let go of the ball. The goalposts look rather alarmingly like those found on a Quidditch pitch:

AFL goalposts

If a player kicks the ball cleanly through the middle goalposts, this is a “goal” and is worth 6 points. If it goes in but bounces off the middle posts, bounces off a player from the other team or instead passes between one of the two sets of outer posts, this is a “behind” and is worth 1 point – I find this amusing because they have essentially missed the goal but are given a point for trying! Most matches will end something like 100-80 because so many goals are scored.

So, having had the rules explained to me, I felt vaguely prepared for watching the game. However, because the rule structure is somewhat lacking, there are basically nearly 40 players on the pitch who pretty much do whatever they want, and a game of Aussie rules is really just disorganised chaos. I disliked the lack of strategy and found it very unsatisfying to watch, because there really isn’t that much skill involved in scoring a goal and subsequently winning a game. On top of that, for people being paid to play a game that involves handling a ball in various ways, most of the players were fairly crap at throwing, catching and kicking. This frustrated me even more!

Action shot: a Suns player actually manages to kick the ball

However, it was nonetheless fun to sit down pitch-side with some watery Australian beer and watch the game unfold. We were sat behind some really hardcore St Kilda fans against whom we indulged in some light banter and shouting. John and Will, who were rapidly becoming ever drunker, kept shouting hilarious insults at the players who ran past, forgetting that most of the time the poor lads on the pitch could actually hear what they were saying! I felt quite sorry for them! The game ended 74-54 to St Kilda, so although the Suns lost they didn’t lose too badly.

My overall opinion of Aussie rules: a mixture of football, rugby and volleyball, played on a cricket pitch with Quidditch goalposts, with far too few rules and far too many players. Enjoyable when drunk and within shouting distance of the players, but you won’t catch me watching it at home any time soon.

Sunday 31st July – Jamie

It had been brought to my attention that the lovely Miss Jamie-Louise Young was currently on holiday on the Gold Coast as part of her epic trip around Australasia. I couldn’t possibly miss out on the opportunity to meet up with her and find out what she’d been up to – it really hammered home to me the fact I’ve been on the other side of the planet for almost two months!

We decided to go up the Q1 tower to have a drink and watch the sun go down. I brought John and Phoebe, and Jamie brought Charlie (her new man) who seems to me to be a very nice and suitable young man indeed. After getting ourselves settled in the comfy seats with a drink and some unexpectedly massive bowls of chips, we had a lovely chat for a bit and gazed out of the windows. The sunset was beautiful:

Sunset over the Gold Coast 1

Sunset over the Gold Coast 2

Sunset over the Gold Coast 3

Sunset over the Gold Coast 4

Sunset over the Gold Coast 5

After all the excitement of watching a sunset from 80 floors up, we resumed trying to finish the massive bowls of chips and having even more lovely chat. Jamie and Charlie told us about their adventures on the Whitsundays and Fraser Island, and I did the medical student thing where you accidentally talk about gruesome gory details in public (e.g. prolapses, perineal tears and the like – oops). Me and Jamie also kept inadvertently slipping into conversation about recent goings-on in Misson, completely forgetting that everyone else didn’t have a clue what or who we were talking about. We also had general conversation about life in Australia, dogs and how weird it feels now that so many of our friends are married/having kids/both.

By now the sun was well and truly down so we had another wander around to look at the Gold Coast all lit up at night:

SkyPoint is quite high up!

Surfer's Paradise at night-time

I don’t know why but I think that cityscapes sparkling and twinkling at night-time are one of my absolute favourite things to look at: I was mesmerised! By now it was getting late – 9:30pm is pretty much bedtime by Queensland standards – so we dropped Jamie and Charlie back at their hostel (Charlie is under specific instructions to look after Jamie and will be in trouble if he doesn’t) and went home happy 🙂

PS/ for any of you who haven’t already: Dave is running the Great North Run for MacMillan Cancer Support this year. The big day is rapidly looming and he needs your help to raise his target of £150! Please sponsor him, even if it’s only a couple of quid, every little helps and it’s a fantastic cause: http://www.justgiving.com/David-Thewlis

PPS/ I just had an absolute panic when I realised that Austalian keyboards don’t have pound signs on them!

“After all this time, Severus?” “Always.”

Friday 15th July – Greek foods

Just a quick mention of the fact that I went for proper Greek food for the first time ever last Friday and it was incredible. I now plan to go to Greece one day and spend a week or two eating similarly huge quantities of moussaka, green leafy things in various states of cookedness (dolmathes and tabbouleh representing either end of the spectrum) , and pastry-based goods such as spanakopita and baklava. Long live the Greeks and their ability to make foods that not only taste excellent but also have names that are fun to say.

Saturday 16th July – Harry Potter

Finally, after months of ecstatically childish excitement, I went to watch the last Harry Potter film and with it feel my childhood officially come to an end. Joining me in observing this rite of passage were Sally (who is a proper person and understands the magicalness); Phil, Michael, Wham, and Jesse (who are losers and spent most of the time picking holes in the plot); and Brendan (who I think secretly loves the Potter but was pretending he didn’t in order to look cool).

I was genuinely worried that the grown-ups directing the film would have cocked it up in some way as they have been known to do in the past, but against all my negative expectations it was FANTASTIC. The story is heartbreaking, terrifying and somehow still rather spiffingly British, the special effects were easily good enough to rival Lord of the Rings, and the many much-neglected proper actors in the cast got to do some proper acting, especially Maggie Smith and the oh-so-sexy-yet-impossibly-becoming-ever-sexier Alan Rickman, who had me practically weeping towards the end. I won’t ramble on about how good it was (trust me, I could go on all week) but I would definitely recommend it to anyone who has read the books/seen the previous films and will therefore understand what’s going on. If you haven’t fulfilled any of the aforementioned criteria and are therefore a muggle, watch this infinitely simplified version of events instead:

I feel the need (rather pointlessly as she will never read it) to thank J K Rowling from the bottom of my heart for making my life that little bit more magical, and reinforcing my belief that you should always try to see the best in people, even if they are greasy heads of Slytherin house who used to be Death Eaters.

After Harry Potter the plan was to go to the lovely Lisa’s house for a party. We went to Michael’s house first, where his wonderful mum proceeded to give me a very informative lesson about Japanese alcoholic drinks, namely sake and plum wine, and lots of it! I hadn’t realised how dangerously drinkable sake is. I also had no idea that in Japanese culture your guest isn’t allowed to have an empty cup, and I felt rude for not finishing what was in my cup every time it was refilled, so I ended up very tipsy very quickly! We also ate interesting Japanese snacks including dried pea things and tiny dried silver fishies, which I felt a little bit sorry for but they were yummy, so it’s sort of their own fault.

Thankfully we left for Lisa’s while I was still able to walk. The party was a lovely affair, and I seem to remember me and Sally spending a long time talking through various technicalities of Harry Potter with various people. After that conversation moved on the the usual: prog rock, crap films and the like. Joel was going around taking photos on his very expensive-looking camera, and when Michael told him that I hate having my picture taken all hell broke loose… I dread to think how many terrible pictures he has of me on his camera now! Joel, if you’re reading this, never let them see the light of day (unless by some miracle there are actually some acceptable ones). I did however manage to take some nice photographs that didn’t have me in them:

Lovely Australian people

After this picture was taken everything becomes a bit of a haze. I seem to remember talking to many people about many indeterminate but retrospectively fascinating things, putting a lot of skittles in Phil’s beer for no reason and then developing the worst bout of hiccups I’ve ever had and being terrified that they would never ever stop (they did, after a not particularly impressive length of time).

Monday 17th July – Limes & kumquats

On Monday I decided to have a day off, but was either too lazy or too unimaginative to think of anything to do. By default this meant that it was time to do some baking, so I dragged Phil to the shop to get ingredients. After spending ELEVEN DOLLARS on limes and even more dollars on various other things (including stamps to finally post my postcards) we came home and managed to put together a triumphant concoction of key lime and candied kumquat pie.

Key lime and candied kumquat pie: not for the faint-hearted or weak of tooth

 Unfortunately we went a bit too mental with the candying of kumquats and the end result was two-thirds yummy pudding (the limey bit and the biscuity bit) with the other third being a rock solid layer of – admittedly rather tasty – kumquat concrete in between them! It was still highly enjoyable but I have learned valuable lessons about the use of potentially dangerous candied items for the future. If anyone has any small children with wobbly teeth that need removing quickly and humanely, get in touch and I’ll send you the recipe!

More all Aussie adventures (mainly involving food)

Thursday 30th June – Market

We went to a little market where John and Phoebe live to obtain foods. The fruit and veg stall was really impressive: everything they sold seemed to be giant versions of normal vegetables, but that’s apparently just the way things grow out here! We got some rhubarb, a giant parsnip and some funky purple carrots. I obtained a custard apple, which is a strange bumpy tropical fruit that apparently tastes (unsurprisingly) like custardy apple. More detail on my adventures with those tomorrow.

The mysterious custard apple

Linda bought some soap from a little man because “he looked lonely” – I’m glad I’m not the only person in the world who’s been known to do that – some candles, and some coffee from another little man who roasted it himself and talked nicely about it. I also discovered a new kind of pastry item – a bee sting, which is a honey-flavoured bun with rum-flavoured custard in the middle and totally scrummy. We got some hot smoked salmon to have for tea (all the mackerel was gone *sob*). Missy the dog made two new friends: a tiny sausage dog that had her trying to break her neck with her lead by running round in incessant circles after it, and the gayest poodle in the world ever. There was also a very cool band playing tunes in the background. I love markets 🙂

Saturday 2nd July – Custard Apples

I was determined to make a cake, but not just any cake! I decided to put the mysterious custard apple to good use by making a rhubarb and custard apple buckle, which is an American recipe essentially involving a cake with loads of crumble topping on it (why limit yourself to just one dessert when you can have two? It’s the American way!). After a daunting trip to the shops on my own to obtain further mysterious ingredients like buttermilk – which by the way tastes nowhere NEAR as nice as you would think – and hazelnut meal I was ready to embark on my buckley quest. The baking process went without a hitch (many thanks to Phil for helping with stirring things) and the end result looked and tasted yummy:

Rhubarb and custard apple buckle

After the resounding success of our baking escapades, me and Phil went on to produce some rather good cidery pork for tea and then decided to make a cocktail using the other half of the custard apple and some gin, which was also very nice. Then it was time to go to an engagement party and meet more lovely Australians. I ended up drinking quite a lot of wine and having to explain the apparently baffling geography of Great Britain and Ireland using the items immediately available to me on the table:

Makeshift map of Britain for explaining to Aussies where things are

I also gained insight into what Newcastle is like from a tourist perspective – apparently “a bit of a dump”. When it was time to leave we went back to Michael’s for a bit to listen to music, and I discovered the splendidness of Jethro Tull.

Most of the following week – Flu

After suffering what seemed to be a gradually worsening hangover for most of Sunday, and panicking briefly about whether or not I had the Hendra virus, I realised I was in fact getting the flu. Turns out Australian flu viruses make British ones seem puny and pathetic! I was a feverish mess for a couple of days before developing a head brimming with snot and a horrendous consumptive cough that made people in the street flinch away in shock before looking at me pityingly as if I was dying. I’m still a bit consumptive even now, but as people have rightly pointed out I’m now immune to this year’s winter flu virus, hooray!

Tuesday 5th July – Sausages

To cheer me up on Tuesday Malcolm kindly allowed me to help him make some sausages, another culinary activity I have been as yet unexposed to. It’s quite amazingly simple: you put a load of meat through a machine to make it into mince, then squish in some seasoning, spices and vinegar (you can’t actually taste the vinegar when they’re cooked) before putting it through the machine again with a special attachment that feeds the mix into some pig intestines.

Italian breakfast sausage

We made some South African Boerewors with beef and loads of coriander seed, and some Italian Breakfast style pork sausages with John’s secret spice mix, as well as meatballs with the stuff that was left over. Loads of fun 🙂

Thursday 7th July – Bugs

Dave arrived from Adelaide to visit the Gold Coast for a few days. Unfortunately this meant I had to do the hour-long drive to Brisbane airport in my persistently feverish and delirious state, and the fact that massive lorries and idiots in Utes and things kept trying to kill me did not help matters. Thankfully I made it there and back safely, and had a relaxing afternoon after showing Dave around the Frazer house and introducing him to the dogs.

In the evening we went to Saks on the broadwater at Main Beach to eat some serious seafood. I valiantly tried and failed yet again to see what all the fuss is about with “natural” oysters: they’re not awful but they are still awkwardly reminiscent of eating cold snot. We also had some of the best calamari I’ve ever eaten; in my opinion the test of a good seafood restaurant is how they cook their squid, and Saks gets full marks! Since coming to Australia one of the things I’ve really wanted to eat is Moreton Bay Bugs, which are a kind of prehistoric-looking flat crustacean found only around northern Australia (Moreton Bay in particular, hence the name). In order to fulfil my dream of consuming this beast, me and Dave decided to get a mega seafood platter:

Seafood platter: Moreton Bay Bugs, Queensland prawns, black mussels, oysters Kilpatrick, grilled reef fish, soft shell crab, lemon pepper squid and octopus

I really enjoyed the bugs, which taste a lot like lobster. My favourite thing was definitely the soft shell crab though: I’ve had disappointing experiences with crab in the past but these were just incredible, I really will never understand why sea creatures have insisted on evolving to become so tasty!

Coming soon: the rest of Dave’s visit, complete with traumatic fishing experiences, rainforest skywalk and a tropical fruit-tastic day out!

First impressions of Australia (warning: may contain jet lag)

On Friday the 10th of June 2011 I set out on what is going to be the biggest adventure of my life so far – an elective in Australia. But before that started, I had to first of all pack my things (and repack them several times) and survive a rather long and tiring journey, made worse by the fact that some parts of it involved putting up with a childishly excitable David Thewlis on a train, and other parts of it involved being in London around Londoners and having to get the Tube. Despite each of these factors I somehow managed to make it onto a plane from London to Dubai, and found myself  sandwiched between the most fabulous tranny I’ve ever encountered and a man who slept for the entire journey. I spent most of my time alternating between talking about food, wine, cognac and books with the lovely tranny when she was awake and leaning over her to take photographs out of the plane window when she was asleep – I myself was far too excited and disorientated to sleep! I watched a massive thunderstorm happen over Jordan and saw the sun coming up from above the clouds, which I always love:

Three sets of sunrises

After about 7 hours we arrived in Dubai, which looked like this (note the Burj Khalifa in the very dusty foreground):

Dubai from the sky - makes you thirsty just looking at it

I can confirm that the rest of the United Arab Emirates looks exactly like the above but with no buildings and no rivers. Dubai airport was nice – lots of oily wealth being liberally splashed about – but you could feel the heat pressing in on you even through the air conditioning: not my ideal holiday destination seen as I can’t even cope with English summers! I spent an hour wandering around and occasionally being jeered at in Arabic by men my own age for being a woman who a) wasn’t wearing a burkha/hijab, b) had breasts and legs, and c) dared to look them in the eye with the exact mixture of pity and distaste they deserved. If they’d known that I was being allowed to use my tiny woman’s brain to study medicine I’m sure they would have had a heart attack.

It was something of a relief when we got back on the plane to find myself sitting next to a bloke from Newcastle called Terry who had moved to New Zealand with his wife a few years ago. We spent the next 14 (yes, FOURTEEN, at least four of which were over Australia itself) hours of our airbourne journey pleasantly getting each other drinks, swapping bits of food we didn’t want, getting up to jiggle our bums around when they went to sleep and reviewing various films that were available on the in-flight entertainment. I love travelling on my own purely because I seem to end up sitting next to so many interesting and amiable people while I’m doing it!

So after two whole days of constant travelling without sleep, I finally landed in Brisbane at 6:30am on Sunday morning. After confessing the mortal sin of carrying chocolate in my luggage and fending off some very cute Customs sniffer dogs who went mental at the smell of the apples I’d eaten at Heathrow on Friday, I managed to find my dad’s bezzie mate Malcolm and be driven safely back to Benowa. Unfortunately (but gratifyingly rarely) it looked like this:

I managed to arrive on the first rainy day for months!

Despite having not slept since the Thursday night I was told that I wasn’t allowed to sleep until it was actually bedtime, not just as a punishment for apparently bringing the weather with me but also to save my head from becoming even more of a screaming jet-lagged mess. To keep me occupied in the meantime the Frazer boys Phil and John and their well-known associates Michael (accompanied by the lovely Sally) and the equally lovely Phoebe took me to Surfer’s Paradise for sushi. There, through an insomniac haze, I tried my first ever properly fatty belly tuna, which tasted so gorgeously meltingly amazing I’ve had to confirm to myself several times since that it was not in fact a dream – harder than you’d think under the circumstances. Next step is to go back to try the “fattest” belly tuna, which is an extra $1 a slice but if the last lot is anything to go by it’ll taste like my mouth has died, gone to heaven and started licking God’s face. The crew then took me for another first: bubble tea. It’s basically iced tea in whatever flavour you want with little chewy jelly balls in that you suck up with a big straw. I had loads of fun chasing the little balls around the cup but unfortunately the sugar high and the jet lag combined to make me even more confused, so I’m glad we went home after that!

I lasted about another hour before rather embarassingly crashing out on the sofa at 5pm, and not including a couple of vaguely lucid ambulatory periods later that evening I was out for the count until 3pm the following day! When I finally got up, the view from my bedroom window looked like this…

An example of the other 364 days of the Queensland year

… and has done ever since 🙂 The rest of last week passed in a bit of a blur as it took forever for my head to understand where I was, what time it was, what I was doing and why. I went to a theatre list – the painfully early 7am start was alleviated by the fact I had become temporarily nocturnal – and assisted with a few cases, and spent a day in Malcolm’s rooms doing a clinic but was still too out of it to really take anything in! We went out for Vietnamese food for John’s birthday one night and on another night I was introduced to the legendary event that is the State of Origin rugby match – I can’t wait for the decider! I eventually returned to somniac normality by the weekend, and had a few adventures which I shall report in due course.

I end my first foray into blogland with a token Australian joke: What’s the difference between yogurt and Australia? Yoghurt has some culture.