As I get yet older, I sometimes question whether some of my more bizarre memories are true. Such was the case last weekend when news coverage of the Good Friday Agreement anniversary reminded me of my first trip to Northern Ireland.
When I started one of the then-new Boots Tutor Practitioner jobs back in the early nineties, I was required to travel to various parts of the UK to deliver training lectures to colleagues in practice. The first of these was to the practice in central Belfast, a city still experiencing the Troubles. I was late meeting my new boss, a certain Dr Nizar Hirji, after being detained at the airport. My pre-PowerPoint carousel of slides had proved to be just too suspicious. I finally arrived for my rendezvous at the Europa Hotel, my main memory of which was that the windows in my room bore stickers advising me to keep at least 1 metre away from them in case of a bomb blast.
My most lasting memory, however, was of walking to the Boots practice, positioned in a shopping centre pedestrian zone like any other, and being passed by six-wheel armoured vehicles manned by heavily armoured troops. What seemed so incongruous to me was the norm for my Northern Irish colleagues right up to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. Let us hope the peace holds, despite the threats to it since 2016.
On a lighter note, I reviewed a record card recently concerning an office worker in their early twenties who spent most of their work time at their computer and who was noticing dry eye symptoms. The trainee optometrist, whose record this was, had suggested the symptoms were due to the patient’s contraceptive pill and might wish to see their GP. This now enters the chart, currently topped by the two-year-old cyclo patient who ‘does not drive.’