sherlockYesterday, Thursday, there were no more tests planned. I and Diane spent most of the day in our room.  I took off my hospital clothes and slept in my underwear.  The way I do at home.  Diane came into bed with me.  NTU Hospital beds are narrow, but if you fold up the grid on the side of the bed you’re surprisingly comfortable.

The nurses who came in with pills were a bit horrified.  Two half-naked people in the same bed together!  That foreign professor must be feeling much better already!

Actually we spent the day listening to Librivox recordings of Sherlock Holmes.  Librivox — “accoustical liberation of books in the public domain” — is a web-based collection of ordinary people who read out-of-copyright books, 19th century classics mainly. Why read a book when you can have it read to you?

When I was sick as a kid I always listened to the radio.  It’s endlessly soothing.  On the radio there are fewer sensory data to cope with, and you can listen with the blanket drawn above your head.  The Sherlock Holmes stories are wonderfully well crafted and give a strong sense of the texture of life of late Victorian Britain.  The whole afternoon we just laid there on the bed, drifting in and out of sleep, as men with “swarthy brows,” “sprightly young ladies,” and representatives of “the most well-regarded families in Norfolk” joined the NTU nurses in parading around our room.

I know Sherlock Holmes would have found my cancer.  And he would have eliminated it with a swift blow of his walking stick.

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