One of the benefits of being sick for a month is that you get to live in a muted hinterland. It's great you too can feel just like one of Virginia Woolf's dissenters. Just now I went to the local hospital for a blood test. The building, a gargantuan Victorian edifice designed by Edward Gorey (I swear), is handily close and is unoccupied apart from a woman inside a tiny reception hatch and the blood testing people about a quarter of a mile away down an airless corridor. Having experienced the performance art comedy of the receptionist yesterday (fork handles, parrots and so on) I glided swiftly to the blood sampling area. This place really has been like they were closing it down for the last five years and could easily provide an extremely convincing set for anyone interested in making a zombie film set in an abandoned hospital where a hypochondriac wanders in believing himself to be in a legitimate National Health institution but then finds his mind filling u...