Never Mind the Bollocks...
Hello, I’m Salvadore Vincent, and I’ll be looking after Jonny’s blog for the week. Hopefully you shouldn’t notice too much of a difference – whenever I mention Kathy Sykes, just think “Kirstie Allsopp” and it will be business as usual. If there are any problems, the emergency exits are located here and here.
To refresh my blog-writing skills I looked back at the last time I blog-sat and realised that Jonny must go away at the same time each year. This means that you always get me in a slightly melancholy mood the week after my birthday. Sorry. It was a big one this year as well – half the three score years and ten. Inevitably, my thoughts have been turning to my own mortality and the absolute certainty that any new lump or bump in my body must be terminal cancer.
This is how I came to be sitting in a hospital waiting room wearing nothing but my shoes and a not-quite-opaque-enough gown, praying that having a man touching my testicles with an ultrasound scanner wouldn’t give me an erection.
My name was called. I went in, lay back and tried not to think of Kathy Sykes (the aesthetically aware man’s Carol Vorderman). From his computer screen, the man selected the settings for his hand-held scanner from a menu. It must be that you need different amplitudes and/or frequencies of ultrasound to penetrate to different parts of the body I reasoned scientifically as he scrolled through the long list – “Head”, “Leg”, “Foetus – 3 months”, “Foetus – 6 months”, “Foetus – 9 months”...
Then, finally, he selected the last option: “Small parts”.
HE HADN’T EVEN BLOODY LOOKED YET!
I shall spare you the details of the lubricated testicle touching itself except to say that it’s more expensive in Soho, but you get what you pay for. I have, however, now seen the inside of my scrotum, and very few people outside the field of zip testing can say that. It was actually so fascinating that I was going to ask for a printout of the scan so that I could compete with my sister and her photos of my unborn niece.
“Look everybody – twins.”
But instead I made my excuses and left.
Thankfully, the outcome of the scan was good news – I didn’t get an erection. Oh, and I also don’t have cancer. Roll on 36.
