Around this time eight years ago I was sitting my Higher English exam (first of two tries). For the writing segment you're given a booklet with roughly a dozen topic sentences to pick from. I can't remember what topic led me to write an embarrassing
China Syndrome knock-off - in fact I'd like to forget it entirely. I disliked it enough that I put an apology at the end. However, in the preliminary exam a few months before, I wrote an A+ story I really wish I had gotten photocopied - it was probably one of the best things I had then written. The topic I chose in that exam was "Write about a time you went to hospital". When I saw it I immediately thought of the time I broke my arm in primary school, but I realised that the topic did not necessarily mean 'write about a time
you were admitted to hospital' allowing me some room for genuine on-the-spot creative writing. Soon after I intended to rewrite it from memory (it was a single page at most) for my old website, but I never got round to it and the following is therefore an extremely loose reconstruction. I also can't remember how it ends.
Original written February 2003
When thinking about times I've visited the hospital, the first memory to mind is one of the earlier memories I have. When I was just short of four years old my brother was born and I remember visiting him in the hospital. It was the 15th of November 1990 and as one was born, another was departing (Downing Street). Well, Thatcher resigned sometime that month... close enough, this is good satire.
Being as young as I was, my memory of that time is quite vague and fragmentary. It goes as follows: I woke up in the morning and come down the stairs to find my grandmother in the living room. Then at some point later in the day I was taken to the hospital to see my new brother. I had to climb onto a stool or chair to actually see him in the incubator. I remember it was made of some sort of yellow tinted plastic, and the walls were yellow, and so were the sheets, and the lights. In fact, my entire memory of the hospital room is bathed in a yellow glow. I'm almost certain it wasn't a burst of sunlight filling the room and probably just a visual indicator of the state of the NHS after a decade of Conservative Government.
Only the red and black of a bottle of Coca-Cola break the streetlamp monochrome of that memory. I had brought some for my mother - and it wasn't that Victory-Cola knockoff, but the genuine unrationed stuff only available to Outer-Party members. No wait, this parody is getting confused. {Final paragraph missing}.
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Introduction written May 2010
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