“So it is definitely open on Saturday morning, then?”

The Doctor’s Receptionist nods, replacing the receiver having checked the information that I need with the Hospital. My morale plummets like a dead starling; it is an incontrovertible law of time and space that the chances of any Hospital facility being open on Saturday mornings is in inverse proportion to the information that you are given by the Hospital about their Saturday morning opening hours.

“Definitely,” she assures me. “From nine until twelve, they say.”

I return home to prepare a sample.

It turns out that there is one thing more unpleasant than cleaning up a diarrhoea-ridden Baby. It is cleaning up a diarrhoea-ridden Baby whilst trying also to scrape some of the diarrhoea off the Baby with a lolly stick and from thence into a sample jar. I cough and gag as I perform this operation. After a process that I am considering writing an article about for ‘Debacle – the quarterly journal of the British Fiasco Society’, I am the proud possessor of some turd in a clear plastic jar.

I wash my hands and then wash my hands again. After leaving the Baby in the care of the LTLP, I wash my hands and drive speedily through the poppy-strewn country lanes to the Hospital.

The car park is a short walk from the main entrance; the distance from the main entrance to the Pathology Lab is equivalent to eighteen football pitches laid end to end, plus three and a half metres. I arrive clutching my turd, slightly out of breath from hurrying.

Continued tomorrow...