Rambling on as usual

We’re having some lovely warm sunny weather at the moment
interspersed with a little cloud. However the forecasters say
we’re in for a lot of rain next Sunday and Monday ... which
just happens to be … our Bank Holiday weekend! Not much fun
for people with the weekend off.

This weekend is the time of year when university students will
be cramming everything in for their end-of-year or final exams,
so the wet weather will be an incentive for them to stop in
and to get their books out.

I used to be a university campus GP, so I know it’s a very
busy time for the doctors too on campus, trying to get
everyone medically fit enough to sit their exams, or
alternatively writing out excuse notes for them.

During all my secondary school and university years, I was
petrified by exams – some went brilliantly well, others were a
nightmare. I experienced exam dreams for many years afterwards
... you probably know what they’re like – turning up at the
exam room having done very little revision, or having done the
wrong revision for the exam paper, or turning up at the exam
room wearing pyjamas, or with a pencil instead of a pen, or
spending far too long answering just one question on the exam
paper … etc, etc.. Some of these happened to me in the past.

After I qualified as a doctor, I told myself that I needn’t
take any more exams, which is what I did. I went to lots of
postgraduate education classes and courses instead, to keep up
to date.

To update you on the strange burning sensations in my knees
and shins with sitting close to my old computer tower and
wi-fi uni... I can’t blame the wi-fi unit entirely, but my
discomfort gets a lot worse when the unit is on.

I get no trouble at all when I’m sitting some distance away
using Mrs C’s laptop, in our dining room downstairs. The signal
from the wi-fi unit is of low strength there ... however the
signal from my neighbour’s wi-fi unit is a very good one ..
and that’s from the house next door - a short distance up the
road from us.

I recall from my GP days that when I used ultrasound massage
on people’s legs after sports injuries, I was advised not to
use the ultrasound over the shin bones, as it heats up the
bone, giving rise to bone pain. It may be that I’m getting a
similar effect with sitting near the electrical equipment in
my study.

Some of you may have seen a BBC Panorama programme earlier
this week, about wi-fi being used in some of our schools and
in several large cities in the UK. I saw one investigator
walking around with a monitor in the streets of Norwich, where
wi-fi units have been attached to lamp-posts to give wi-fi
coverage throughout the city centre.

The programme was asking how safe is wi-fi? Is there is any
health hazard to us, living in modern electronic smog? No
doubt the controversy about all this will carry on for many
years to come. For the time being, I’ll carry on using Mrs C’s
laptop more, with the wi-fi on upstairs.