When did you last see your tonsils?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nI’m old, ok? That’s why I don’t want to die yet. It’s also why, it is submitted m’lud, that when I hear a question like that I grab the first thing that comes out of the grab-bag of associations and random historical artefacts I call my memory. Which was this picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I last saw my tonsils over *cough* years ago. I don’t have any. They were taken out at the Royal United Hospital in Bath, which is what happened to almost everyone’s tonsils back then. I imagine, although I don’t know, they went into the incinerator there. But I don’t know. So I can’t answer this presumably vital medical question. I asked him to say it again in case I’d misunderstood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nope. That’s what he’d said. Do I know where my tonsils are? No. I still don’t. I know where they were<\/em>, but that’s a completely different thing. Once we’d cleared that up we got down to the unpleasantness, such as it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\nYou’re asked to sanitise your hands. Then blow your nose and chuck the tissue in the bin provided. Sanitise your hands again. You’re given a swab, like a cotton bud from the pound-shop, but longer, much thinner and I’d guess, as there is one per sterile pack for one use only, rather more than a pound. You’re asked to rub the swab up and down your absent tonsils (or in my case, where they used to be once upon a time in a land long ago) four times. Then stick it up your nose and rotate it ten times. Not nine. Not eleven. I thought that was rather sweet. The gagging I couldn’t help doing when I stuck the swab in the back of my throat, having no tonsils to act as a guide, wasn’t rather sweet, but that was as unpleasant as it got.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All done, go away. You get an email half an hour later. I’m clear. Today, anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t cost you anything. It’s essential it gets done if we’re going to have any real idea how many people are infected, if people can be infected and more importantly can give the virus to other people, without knowing they have anything wrong with them at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But there are things wrong with all this. It’s very wrong this is only being done now. It’s utterly ludicrous that this Track and Trace programme has taken a year to roll-out. It’s absolutely farcical and yet somehow predictable now in England, that the only way I knew about the test even being available was by being on Facebook at the right time, totally by accident. I’ve heard nothing about it on local radio, national radio or the local newspaper website. How that’s supposed to be effective is unclear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What also isn’t clear is how NASA spent $2 billion on a rocket to Mars but in the UK it costs \u00a3200 billion to stick a baby bud up your nose. It’ll be a world-beating reason, whatever it is. Obviously. You have the Prime Minister’s word on it.<\/p>\n