Dear Varsity,

Our recent house-warming party was a rampant success, with the eclectic mix of guests, (think colleagues, inebriated mechanics, and everything in between), turning up an equally eclectic selection of gifts that ranged from home-made passion fruit juice to a gargantuan container of discoloured kitchen implements each individually wrapped in a sheet from a 1985 edition of German newspaper, Die Welt. Reggae blared. Hips swayed. Sea urchins attacked those of us who couldn’t quite resist a mid-party dip. And I force fed home-made sangria to an aged neighbour who didn’t have the French to explain that he’d just undergone throat surgery and was on an alcohol-ban.

Talking of throats, I decided to pay the doctor a visit yesterday on account of my newfound inability to neither swallow nor talk. Usually I’d leave such an illness to fester and multiply, but I soon realised that students exposed to predominantly silent and saliva-saturated teaching methods are inclined to lurch ever-increasingly towards tyranny. And, for obvious reasons, a tyrannical group of 18year old boys in a vocational school that recently felt the need to install weapon-detection scanners at is entrance is in no way desirable. So, with the pharmacy having outright rejected my plea for prescription-free cheap analgesics, I drag my hunched, decrepit self off to a doctor who greets me with crossed arms and an iron stare. Feigning incomprehension on being told that she isn’t seeing patients that day, I remain in her doorway with my perfected bemused-Brit expression until she succumbs, and leads me in. Then it all gets a bit strange as, out of an unfathomable desire to make this middle-aged Guadeloupian doctor like me, I embark upon examination-table chit chat that I now believe may have come across as inept flirtation. ‘You have one very large tonsil’ she says. ‘Thank you very much’ I giggle in response. ‘Does it hurt here?’ ‘Oh, Doctor!’ More giggling. This wasn’t working, I needed to change tack. Maybe I could dazzle her with a witty reference to Molière? She stares blankly back at me as I say something that is both an unforgivable misquotation of a title of Molière’s play, ‘The Imaginary Invalid’, and entirely irrelevant, clearly wondering what the hell such a pretentious, confused and ill English girl was doing in the Guadeloupian jungle...

Haxie

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