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There is little in life to match the feeling of vulnerability as you gingerly step out of your changing cubicle, wearing only two voluminous yet still flimsy gowns and a pair of disposable paper slippers. The initial worry as to whether or not you tied the right bits of string together pales into insignificance as you enter the public domain feeling more naked than you have ever done before.
The first thing you notice is that it is quite chilly, especially as, most likely, you are not used to cool air wafting freely in your nether regions. Then you are immediately propelled into the presence of other, equally discomforted people wearing exactly the same outfit. As with any visit to a hospital, plenty of waiting around is the order of the day. Of course, wearing next to nothing in the presence of complete strangers dampens down your desire to be sociable, so this initial waiting stage is inevitably conducted in a monastic silence and completely excludes even a glimpse of eye contact.
So, once again, any reading material whatsoever assumes a profound and deep level of interest as you pretend to be engrossed in an eight-year-old, extremely dog-eared Reader’s Digest. You ignore the fact that half the pages are missing and the other half fall onto the floor with regularity.
Your equally uncommunicative fellow travellers are picked off one by one as their names are called out from a sheet, and you soon begin to doubt that your name will ever be called at all. Have they forgotten you? Are you in the right waiting area, or even the right hospital? Again, no one ever lets his doubts turn into action as the uncalled sit there mute and forlorn.
You are also acutely aware that, due to the gown arrangement, your wedding tackle could be in full view of the people sat opposite, which prompts you to adopt the most convoluted seating position to exclude any possibility of exposure. One moment of inattention could result in you unthinkingly adopting the habitual male position of maximum angle between the legs or, even worse, crossing your legs. So the need for complete focus on the seating position means that you have no chance whatsoever of taking in a word on the page in front of you, or even of spotting that the pages you have open were reinserted upside down by a previous reader.
Finally, you are called through. But it proves to be the usual false dawn as you go round a corner only to see that your relatively cosy waiting area has been replaced by a handful of hard-backed chairs in a corridor. I’m sure Walt Disney learned his techniques of how to disguise the length of the wait from a past hospital visit; although he improved on the science with the idea that being entertained by Mickey Mouse enhances the passage of time better than staring at lime-green walls.