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RIGHT; you’ve had your holidays
and achieved a tan resembling a cross between hot buttered toast and a
neon radish. You’ve visited more cathedrals than 12th century pilgrims and
had your fill of peasant pottery and carpet-weaving villages, faded
Byzantine frescos in dusty, decrepit art galleries and broken bits of
Etruscan pottery in museums. If you are ever asked to visit some ruin that
you wouldn’t give a second glance to at home or peer at another
broken-down amphitheatre or dank, dismal, Neolithic burial chamber, you
are likely to deliver a crisp but courteous negative.
Doubtless,
there was the sun, sand, sea and, possibly - your lives are a closed book
to me - romantic entanglements at riot-ous resorts in Cyprus, Rhodes and
other crazily-cracked spots on the rim of the Mediterranean basin and
elsewhere, but when the postcard sun has set behind the brochure minarets
and beached gondolas, what is left, apart from holiday snaps, fading
memories, depleted bank balances and lingering picturesque afflictions
with names like "The Pharoah’s curse" and "Montezuma’s revenge"?
To make
vacations meaningful, and leave a deep and lasting impression on the minds
and bodies of consumers in the growing holiday medication and surgery
market, several enterprising travel agents have breaks for discerning
pill-takers, medicine-mainliners, Zimmer-pushers and users of ephedrine
inhalers who are prepared to pay for operations in glamorous surgical
hospitals abroad rather than face the usual NHS waiting-lists, dreary
wards, depressing cuisine and anti-social bacteria.
Sunstroke
Tours are offering 14 days cruising to the more sanitary Mediterranean
ports on the Epidural Queen, a luxury, floating hospital/hotel,
fully-equipped for operations, regular or emergency, complicated or
trivial, and replete with ready-to-hand accessories so essential for the
discerning, leisure-loving patient, including surgical stockings,
collapsible alloy crutches, tropical liberty bodices, swimming-pool
deaf-aids, self-inflating, anti-haemorrhoidal rubber-rings and, as
optional extras, oxygen tents and drip-feeds in cabins.
Cutting-Edge
Cruises, on the new Scalpel of the Seas, the first and last word in
theatre opulence, employ the most expensive and skilled surgeons whose
deft hands are only equalled by their unwavering sea legs in operations
that range from traditional, "sawbones" methods to the latest keyhole
techniques as used by the world’s leading surgical peer groups.
Voyaging in
what is effectively an ingeniously-planned cordon sanitaire to
well-chosen, comparatively-antiseptic Pacific ports, the ship is equipped
to ensure, for instance, that on some enchanted evening, you could meet a
stranger who could have your dodgy knuckles replaced in less time than it
takes a nurse to give you a bed bath and cholesterol check or offer a
dazzingly-swift but oh-so-effective, colonic irrigation conveniently
between the deck quoits final (for single liposuction ladies) and the
captain’s germicidal-cocktail party.
It is not all cut and stitch,
nip and tuck, champers and caviare; first-class entertainment for
passengers is also provided, including talks - on the first ship - on
subjects like The Place of the Enema in Trans-alpine Gaul and How to Breed
and Apply Leeches, and, on the second argosy, the popular Do-it-Yourself
Acupuncture.
Some enterprising airlines offer fly and
drive-to-hospital-bed holidays that are popular with those who want to
enjoy a bit of temporary ill-health with a fun time among the medicos and,
as it were, combine gin and bitters with joint replacement and maybe a
nose job and breast enlargement thrown in for good, wallet-slimming
measure.
Transincontinent Airways have such Sun and Surgery
vacations combined with imaginatively-planned, apres-theatre entertainment
such as Rum and Rumba knee-replacement dances and premier cru
medicine-tastings with commentaries from joke-crammed pharmaceutical
salesmen.
Most popular of the new, medicine-oriented breaks is
Hypochondriac Horizons (de-parting St Pancreas) by which dedicated
psychosomatics and practising patients travel in haute cuisine,
Pullman-type trains to Turkey, once "the sick man of Europe" and returning
by Air Linctus.
They can discuss afflictions with fellow-sufferers,
show operation scars and enjoy reminders by trained staff on when to take
pills: "Two white before breakfast, red-and-black at eleven, yellow ones
after every meal and, before bed, the blue, remembered pills." A
therapeutic good time is guaranteed to all. |
