Down to Paddington Medicentre this afternoon to get all my shots for Tanzania. I was surprisingly calm about the idea of having loads of needles stuck into me and being injected with deadly diseases in order to stop me getting the deadly diseases that were being injected into me.
I haven't had any shots since I was a child. One of my earliest memories is getting some jab or other when I must have been about 5 or 6. My mum told me we were going to get a booster. At the time I was obsessed with the cartoon characters Beep and Booster, who I believe may only have existed within the confines on the Blue Peter annual. I think it might have been a boy and a dog who lived in space or something, but can't recall after all this time. I am 39 years old now and not interested in Beep and Booster and anyone who says I am and have their posters all over my wall and make up my own adventures about them and act them out, is lying.
Now my memory is hazy and I don't know whether my mum was actually pretending we were going to visit Beep and Booster, or whether when I made the mistake of thinking she was talking about that she decided to go along with it, or possibly she didn't understand my confusion. But I certainly got the impression we were going to meet Beep and Booster, so when instead I found myself in a small white room, having a needle injected into my buttock by a man I didn't know I was understandably upset. And cried. And never trusted my mother again. Nor enjoyed the adventures of Beep and Booster quite so much. The cunts.
Today I was under no illusion about what was about to happen, but nor was I apprehensive. It's just a few small pricks (do your own jokes) and some deadly poison floating around in your bloodstream. In my adult life I have been injected in worse places than my arm, but we needn't go into that on a family website. A family website that happily uses the word "cunt". It's for families who aren't upset about swearing.
My travelling companion was a bit more nervous than me, but we got through it all OK. Just as the injections started there was a knock at the door and somone popped their head round the door and said "I'll come back later".
"That's just the doctor," said the person who at that second was injecting some unknown subject into my friend.
"Well who the Hell are you then?" I thought to myself, "Just someone who has walked in off the street and thought it might be fun to see what happens if you inject strangers with unknown fluids?" Then I realised that this calm and professional woman was probably a nurse, so I guess that's all right then. I hope I was correct in this assumption.
I have now been innoculated against Diptheria, tetanus and polio until 2016, Hepatitis A until this time next year, Typhoid for three years and Yellow Fever for a decade.
Yellow Fever is the scariest one. This is the only one of this lot (I believe) in which they inject a little bit of the disease into you. How's that meant to work? The nurse/interloper warned us that we might start to feel flu like symptoms and get a fever during the next few days. I wondered what colour the fever would be. Would it by any chance be yellow? Wasn't she in fact just giving us the very disease we had come here to avoid getting. Apparently according to current medical wisdom this is what you're meant to do. Sounds a bit suspect to me. The jabs didn't hurt too badly. I don't know what the 5 year old me had been complaining about. Fancy crying over something like that. How immature I was.
During the consultation we discussed all the many things that could kill or maim us in Africa. It's an odd thought to be going away to relax somewhere where there is so much danger. Can they innoculate against lions? Or hippopotomuses which are apparently the main killers in the area (for such a thick skinned animal, they are very thin skinned and don't like people taking the piss out of them for being ugly or it's something territorial, can't remember now).
So I paid the woman over 200 pounds for the privilege of being injected with disease that might give me a mini-yellow fever. She might claim that in doing so she may have saved my life, but I am not so convinced.
I was proud to have been such a brave boy and not even cried a bit, though by the end of the evening my arm had started to ache a bit, which is probably the first sign of having contracted yellow fever mixed with tetanus and hepatatis.
One step nearer to my holiday. Going back to my roots in Africa.
We all came from there. Don't let the black people monopolise it. It's the cradle of civilisation.
