With the sudden arrival of Spring weather the garden could wait no longer. It wasn't properly tidied before the onset of Winter and so there was alot of cleaning of pots and pruning of bushes before I could even begin to think of what to plant where.

Whilst dealing with the garden rubbish I felt a nasty prick in my little finger and it looked - to my shortsighted eyes - as though a thorn was still in there. Jay was asked to check and after a certain amount of painful squeezing and prodding he decided that 'it' was too far in.

Remembering good oldfashioned 'yellow basilicon' I trotted down to the chemist to see if such a thing existed here. No, there was nothing like it but the pharmacist obligingly took me round to the back of the shop and had a good prod herself - to no avail. 'Are you up to date with your tetanus injections?' she asked.

I had no idea, so came home and phoned the surgery where we used to be registered. After some searching the receptionist came up with the date of my last jab - 1990!!!!

Back to the chemist with the bad news. They rang the local doctor and soon I was on the way to the surgery clutching a little bag of the necessary vaccines. After a wait of twenty minutes or so I was invited into the consulting room where the doctor took her own turn at prodding the finger and decided there was nothing in there, but the bruising would account for the pain. Then came the injections -TWO; a serum for immediate protection and then the first of the tetanus jabs - in the bum!!

She struggled to pull down my jeans (I was pretty hot and sweaty by then) and announced, 'S... you have a fat backside!'  before administering the needle! Ouch - (for the remark, not the injection!)

Today I have just returned from an embarrassing trip to the dermatologist with the Whale. He has been convinced that he had skin cancer for the past year or so but our doctor put off sending him to a skin specialist until she could bear his complaints no longer.

In France you have to make your own appointment with the specialist of your choice, so after our GP wrote the letter it was down to me to make the arrangements. All the local 'dermatos' had several steps so wheelchair access was not possible. I looked up the hospital in the 'pages jaunes' and found a dermatology department where I made an appointment. However, when the day came I realised to my horror that it was not the local hospital but another one about an hour away!! It was too late to make it so I cancelled.

A friend recommended a specialist in town and said she was sure we could get in with the wheelchair - but we couldn't! Eventually it was a case of booking an ambulance together with another appointment! At that visit the dermatologist confirmed what the GP had been saying all along - that it was a case of warts - but he went about removing them all the same, as a purely cosmetic exercise, giving a further appointment to 'finish off'.

It was this, second appointment that caused my embarrassment. First of all, the Whale became anxious that the ambulance wouldn't turn up and so he rang, not once, but twice to remind them. This meant that when they came the ambulancemen  were not in the best of moods and it showed in the way that they bundled him unceremoniously onto the stretcher and deliberately left his wheelchair behind, saying it wouldn't be needed.

The Whale huffed and swore all the way there because he couldn't see how the doctor would manage to treat his back if he was laying down and then, to add insult to injury, the 'dermato' was running very late. The ambulancemen, unable to do anything else while their stretcher was in use, wandered off for a coffee while I sat opposite the Whale trying to ignore his complaints and his efforts to 'practice' sitting up. Imagine an oversized baby, all red in the face, sitting on a potty and straining . . . . . .

Naturally, the consultation passed without a problem but the Whale was disappointed that he hadn't been given a further appointment. I was mightily relieved.