Weighty issues
Jeremy Clarke
Last week I paid 400 quid for a health screening. I had a number of minor worries — lump on ball, expanding mole, chest pain — that I wanted to clear up but didn’t want to bother my doctor about because he’s such a busy man. Going to see him is usually a hurried, almost panicstricken affair, as if we are both on a rapidly sinking ship. Four hundred pounds is a lot of money, I know. But the thinking was that, if I’m spending that sort of money each year getting my car through an MOT, I might as well have myself MOTed once in a while as well.
To begin with I was weighed by two female nurses. This was something I could very easily have done myself at the leisure centre for 20 pence. But I stepped eagerly up on the scales, assuming that for £400 I was being weighed on scales so finely calibrated that my cutting my toenails the night before would show up as a significant weight loss.
One nurse took the reading, the other wrote it down. The nurse doing the reading squinted uncertainly up at the needle, which was pointing straight up. She seemed to be having difficulty reading it.
I held my breath. The nurse’s Biro was motionless above the notepad. Finally, the nurse doing the reading seemed to reach a decision. ‘Eleven stone 15,’ she said. I looked from one nurse to the other. They both looked a bit uncertain. ‘Fifteen what?’ I said. The nurse doing the reading refused to commit herself. The other gamely stuck her neck out and said it was pounds, wasn’t it?
‘So how many pounds in a stone?’ I said, not entirely sure myself now, outnumbered by nitwits as I was. The nurse with the Biro said 14. I said 14. The nurse doing the reading was happy to go with whatever was the consensus of opinion.
We returned to action stations. I hopped back up on the scales. The Biro was poised over the notepad. The nurse craned forward, ready to count off the calibrations under the needle.
This time she spoke with conviction, announcing my weight as: ‘Eleven stone 14.’ But, again, this didn’t sound right to me. ‘But if there are 14 pounds in a stone,’ I said, appealing to the nurse with the Biro, who was emerging as something of an authority, ‘shouldn’t that be 12 stone exactly? She looked me steadily in the eye as if it were I, the paying customer, who really ought to have the last word on any subject of controversy. Seeing that I was steadfastly leaving the final decision up to her, she said she agreed with me, but that we might as well weigh me once again just to make sure.
The nurse doing the reading craned forward to look at the needle. Her look of bewilderment, then surprise, became relief when I stepped up on to the scales again and the needle sprang to due north. ‘Twelve stone exactly!’ she parroted. Both nurses looked at me to see if was happy with that. I pulled a judicial, but on the whole favourable, face and we pressed on to the next business, which was measuring my height. This passed off without too much controversy, though again I was asked to approve the final figure.
We moved on to an analysis of my lifestyle. For this I sat at a desk opposite the nurse with the writing skills. Did I smoke? Only when I’m drunk, I said. How many cigarettes did I smoke a week? That depended entirely on how many times I got drunk. How many times a week did I get drunk, then? Hard to say, I said. Sometimes not at all.
My failure to offer an average amount of cigarettes smoked in a week became a bit of a sticking point. She said it was important I come up with a figure because the questionnaire was compiled in such a way that the amount of cigarettes I smoked affected my total health score. In the end, to make both our lives easier, we compromised on 14 cigarettes a week, or an average of two a day.
That evening, buoyed by a provisional thumbs-up from the health screening and a celebratory new pair of shoes, I smoked 22 cigarettes. I also smoked several pipes of crack cocaine for the first time. Knowing my exact weight and height was a boon because it gave me the confidence to face the unknown with a stronger sense of my own identity. But I needn’t have worried because I was so drunk they had little or no effect on me.
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