A Christmas Casualty

My friend Aliche texted me yesterday to tell me about the seasonal episode of Holby City. I refused to believe that the plot could be more preposterous than the one a couple of years ago, when an oil tanker crashed into the middle of A&E, but the staff somehow managed to keep the facility open and just work around their new problem. It turns out, however, that the scriptwriters have surpassed themselves in 2007.

According to Liche, a surgeon ducks out of an operation in order to top himself, but is stopped just in time by a mysterious figure. The sawbones is then taken on a journey in which he's shown a version of the world in which he'd never been born. As you can imagine, this miserable parallel universe is full of suffering and woe. With a new appreciation of his contribution to medical science and the wellbeing of the general public, the surgeon returns just in time to complete the op and save the day.

It's another milestone in gritty, realistic medical drama from the BBC. I was hoping to wake up this morning and discover the plot synopsis to have been a disturbed dream, but Aliche's text is still on my phone.

This is a good opportunity, incidentally, to give a mention to the Xmas card she sent me last week. It's from a company called Modern Toss (http://www.moderntoss.com/) and features a house bedecked with garish Christmas decs. Illuminated reindeer and snowmen are casting a kitsch glow across the whole of the local neighbourhood. A neighbour knocks on the door and asks whether it would be possible to turn the lights down, as they're affecting his wife's dialysis machine. "Perhaps you'd like to explain that to my little kiddie," comes the response.