A journey to the middle of the patient

These days hospitals explain but do not show. The Comfortingly Maternal nurse told me my throat would be anaesthetised "with a lemon-flavoured spray". The guy who was going to do the work, and who seemed younger than the average 125 cc racing motorcyclist, said the anaesthetic "would taste of lemons". When the spray nozzle was inches away the Comfortingly Maternal nurse reminded me to expect "lemons".

Informational overkill on the local which tasted like aloes. But not a sight of the endoscope. A shame. Hospital equipment is always superbly fit-for-purpose and comes in authoritative stainless steel. Also an endoscope has a neat little joystick so that the viewing head can be rotated... well, deep down.

I submitted to a procedure which could be likened to a course on sword-swallowing but without the theatricals. The joystick manipulator chatted to an aide, mercifully not about soccer, and I imagined myself stripped to the waist, wearing ballooning red silk trousers, standing on the stage and raising a World War One bayonet high above my head. Shaved armpits! Yes, they would be a must.

The endoscope appeared to print out results automatically. Mine said, in effect, that if terra australis incognita existed it remained incognita. I resented not seeing proof of the trip the endoscope had made. Hadn't I provided the venue? Pregnant women get to view their babies courtesy of ultrasound. Why not a DVD for endoscopees?

TECHNO-ART For a perfect example of technology metamorphosing into art, go to Marja-Leena's website (http://marja-leena-rathje.info/). Under Photoworks click on Found Objects. There, on a beach, is the remains of a car over which a thousand tides have washed. The photos give new meaning to the word bio-degradable. In another twenty years the car will be gone but in the interim there is a tug-of-war between the forces of corrosion and the engineered details of this most typical of man-made structures. Aesthetics is winning. The straight-line members of the chassis are softening into irregular shapes. The gearbox has become a blob, parts of which seem to be carved from soft stone. Only the steering mechanism still proclaims its earlier function but its defiance is clearly doomed. Compared with the slam-bang speed with which the car was put together its decay is much more long-term and therefore strangely poignant. The sea wins.