It's the hospital I was working in when I first started blogging, in 2005. I was teacher on the children's ward, mainly for kids with a leg in traction, but I'd do bits of this and that with anyone who was up for it. I'd visit them but there's no one still there.

I keep getting flashbacks though - the particular soap in the toilets and the paper towels - hospitals don't do air-dryers - that feeling on my hands.

The place I used to go to smoke when there was a particularly tedious patient I wanted to avoid - not a child but an adult - there were always a few gathered by the door for a smoke in their pyjamas, often with drips attached, trailing behind them, and they'd usually be around for quite a few days and most of them would chat. The majority were perfectly amiable (as in life generally) but every now and then there'd be some cunt droning on about foreigners or benefit scroungers or whatever and I'd go round the corner where the NHS staff went for a fag (smoking by the doors was prohibited but I was Education not NHS, with no boss on site and could do what I liked). I'd forgotten that. They're still there, puffing away.