Random Tweets

You may have your cologne but consume it 

/ graham3693 / 2 Comments

The Severe Australian Custom Regulations according to the Qatar check in person.

I knew instantly and instinctively that the check in process with the Qatar clerk was heading towards a mildly irritating interaction. Given I am flying Business Class there was minimal queue – I approached carrying my rucksack in front and luggage on my back (backpack style and about 15kg). Curtly she requested that she needed my passport and please put my luggage on the weigh belt. 

Now that is a quite reasonable request but it was asked abruptly and in such a manner as to imply that both tasks needed to done not only rapidly but simultaneously. Such a feat wouid be impossible even for the winner of the Gold medal in the clean snatch and grab event at Sydney olympics – a weight lifting event which has nothing to do with what ever else you may be thinking!

Having completed the process and confirming that my luggage had been booked through to Adelaide, she then said “Sir, I must warn you that due to Australian Border and Custom Regulations any duty free goods that you purchase in Frankfurt will be confiscated in Doha as you are not permitted to take them through to Australia “. 

 I was totally dumbfounded. Not that I had any intention of buying duty free goods anyway! Was this, I pondered, the influence of bloody Barnaby Joyce. For final good measure she clarified the ruling by emphasising that any expensive perfumes would not only be confiscated but she said breathlessly, destroyed! So it seemed that any Chanel No 5 I might purchase would be drained away into the Suez Canal.

The statement was delivered with a complex combination of severity and schadenfreude: don’t blame me or Qatar, blame Australia. She saw my quivering bottom lip, how could any country that has just voted back in Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister, be so authoritarian! Then perhaps realising that she had been rostered on the Businesses Class check in desk this morning rather than Economy, she back tracked a little and reassured me that of course nothing would stop me from buying a couple of hundred dollars of duty free chocolates…. So long as I ate them before landing in Doha. 

She was I am convinced a retrenched member of the former East German STASI police force.

In a brain fog I rambled through the avenues of duty free shops with the realisation that like Johnny Deep’s dogs, I had been effectively neutered. Bugger Barnaby Joyce I seethed! I shall buy clothing – wear it on and off the plane AND a bottle of  a 100ml bottle of Tom Forde Neroli at $289… Which I shall drink before landing! Skip the Moet. 

a little something that I am thinking of ordering for my music room

to remind me of the tranquillity of my trek as I sit in the Doha transit lounge and a 7 hour delay


 

Yes – Lost in the “Wellness Centre”

/ graham3693

So it appears that these large hotels nestled in the small valleys of the Schwarzwald – and these establishments are the only apparent buildings of the village- exist for those Germans seeking wellness, of which there are obviously millions! 

As I sauntered through each of these centres, all by the way have a heated 25 metre pool as well as the listed spa,  saunas, massage and  aromatherapy, I pondered the cost of running  them in terms of water and power! It must be astronomical. 

The accommodation on the trail has been brilliant and given the facilities, food and rooms, some of the best places I have stayed and at a price which defies economics! I am paying about 70 euro a night including access to wellness centres and full breakfast included! 

I am by no means a young man – it is all relative and I am at the younger end of the spectrum of the clientele  at the Wellness Centres. Nakedness is the norm. So large and complex are these centres that like on the Red Deer Trail, becoming a little confused could be a real dilemma, especially after 20 minutes in the Steam Room or even less time in the Finnish Dry Sauna. 

So it was rather delightful so see here that with your Wellness package on the bed were slippers, thick cotton robe, towels and…… a badge with your room number suitable to pin to the robe so that the ripped male masseur could safely escort you back to your room! ….

 

A well heeled colleague.

/ graham3693 / 2 Comments

Do you know the meaning of “discalced”? I did not! Read on for an explanation.

A famous professional colleague who I shall call “Dr M ” to protect her identity, is a unique example of a mirror image. 

As I speak we are both overseas! What’s mirrored about that I hear you ask! Well I can guarantee that EVERY time I travel, so does Dr M, but when I am in the Southern Hemisphere she will be in the north or otherwise at diametrically opposite parts of the same hemisphere. 

When I am pushing a bike up an incline at 9%, she is pushing a leather Louis Vitton travel/shopping bag up a hill in London, Milan, Paris or New York. 

Whilst I am staying at a basic bed and breakfast drinking water sourced from the nearby moat of the medieval castle, Dr M is staying at the Manhattan Intercontinental drinking Moet.

Serious shopping for Dr M is spending all morning in the Prada boutique buying a pair of red shoes whereas serious shopping for me is rushing to the nearest Pharmacy to stock up on toothpaste and dental floss.

We both are lapsed in the religious sense. I was nominally Church of England (not Anglican in the 1950s) Dr M was Catholic. Although it is said as we all know “once a Catholic…..” So it was that booking into York House and learning that it was originally a convent, I immediately had visions of my mirrored colleague residing in these hallowed halls. But just as rapidly I realised from what I have described, it was pure fantasy. 

Her decadent habits would not get her into a Carmelite’s habit let alone past the first of the 47 steps to the nunnery door. 

Finally, and this is the crunch, York House was in 1759 the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites, the term “discalced” means without shoes or bare footed (with dispensation, sandals). 

Should Dr M see the error of her ways and become not only a Nun but also discalced, I, being a friend of Dorothy, would be more than happy to accept a donation of the red shoes. 
   
   

Adelaide is very liveable

/ graham3693

Have just been to a couple of wonderful classical music concerts. The double reed society – so a unique massed ensemble of oboes and bassoons! 

Cycled back through the parkland and passed what I believe is the most elegant under stated fountain in the city.  

   
Not to mention the delightful facade of the original East End Fruit and Vegetable markets 

  
And finally the “Avenue” of Manchurian Pear trees at the front of my house are becoming very tall!  Not to mention the wooly bush! 

  

Mere Mortals – Dr Oliver Sacks.

/ graham3693

As i sit in the oppressive heat that is summer in Turkey, I learn of the death of Dr Oliver Sacks from disseminated melanoma aged 82. A brilliant communicator who also happened to be an unconventional neurologist.He was a very handsome man, a bikie and champion weightlifter. He described himself as celibate but in his last book, “On the Move” he is open about his homosexuality and the joy of meeting a partner in his mid 70’s. Although I never had the privilege of meeting him, readers will surely undertand it when I say that as a neurologist and openly gay man, I have lost a fellow traveller along the yellow brick road.

Less than 12 months ago, the world also lost Robin Williams, the actor and comedian who portrayed Oliver Sacks in the film “Awakenings”. This was based on the book of the same name by Oliver Sacks in which he described the miraculous response to Levodopa of patients who had survived the great influenza pandemic of 1918 (The Spanish Flu) and subsequently developed severe features of Parkinsons Disease.
There are several remarkable coincidences between these two gifted men. Sacks experimented with LSD and other recreational drugs in the 1950s, describing the consequences in one of his first books “Hallucinations”. Robin Williams took his own life and at autopsy had features of Lewy Body dementia, a progressive neurological degenerative disease presenting in a Parkinsons like manner and with unsettlimg hallucinations.

Idle conference  jottings

/ graham3693

Some unrelated jottings during a couple if boring conference sessions.


I had a sense of unease and frustration from day one at the conference. As english is my first and only language, I can’t morally complain about a failure to comprehend when the presenter has a thick Russian accent at a conference in Hungary. Secondly I am bombarded by the very worst convoluted unfathomable PowerPoint slides. Finally at least two sessions discussed new and novel ways to deliver medication to the patient using inventions that have been engineered in a small start up company in which, if one reads the small print of the financial disclosure, the presenter has an interest. 

Many of the papers described using various types of electrical or magnetic stimulation of specific superficial cranial nerves. 

Unashamedly, enrolled patient numbers in these trials were often less than a few dozen!  All one can categorically state is that based on statistically questionable studies of  a few migraneurs, these medical technology companies will make many millions of dollars.

Migraine is often crippling with protracted vomiting. So a minute pump with silastic tubing could deliver the abortive drug into the rectum. How this might work is conjectural but it would certainly take the focus away from the head. Imagine what a creative advertising company could come up with

” yes we know, migraine is a bummer…”

“Migraine – get your head round this…”

” Migraine – does not have to be a pain in the butt.. Or does it?”

” Migraine – we have the answer to your annus horribilus”

” We guarantee to get to the bottom of your migraine”.
Another technology company displayed a leather upholstered reclining chair with a circular magnet which sat on and around the skull. Picture an expensive old fashioned hair salon perm chair but more like a Jason recliner. Elderly patients who were mildly forgetful, sat in this contraption and whilst a high powered magnetic field swirled around their skull, at the same time they were submitted to mind games on a computer screen. Doing this every day for a few months apparently improved  their mental ability which was maintained for at least 12 months.

Surfing my news feeds threw up this bit of fascinating trivia: the results of a 2011 census found only 2,418 self-identified Scientologists in England and Wales. (In contrast, 176,632 respondents identified as Jedi Knights.)


Back to the conference! Hans Lassman a member of the faculty presenting on MS looked for all the world like Victor Borge and on beginning his presentation , had his voice and accent! 
  

day 1 was held in the Hungarian Academy of Science