I'm Dreaming Of A White Change Of Shift

(Why the weird post title, you ask? Ah, 'tis but another concoction of my brilliantly witty mind. You see, this post is both about the nursing blog carnival Change Of Shift as well as about the fact that it snowed yesterday. Hahaha geddit geddit seewhatIdidthere? --Editor)

Change of Shift is up over at my favourite nursing blog, Nurse Ratched's Place, which is also the only medblog I know of to have appeared in Blogger's Blogs Of Note. Mother Jones was kind enough to include one of my posts (yes, medic posts CAN appear in nursing blog carnivals. No, you do not have to be handsome enough to have every nurse in your hospital want to make out with you, but it helps. Cough. --Ed)

This edition of Change of Shift has a Valentine's Day theme, and Mama Jones wrote some very nice words about me:

The Angry Medic wrote this post about a nurse with a hard, tough exterior, and a heart of gold. He says that she likes him. Well of course she likes you, Angry Medic. You’re a good guy. That’s why those nurses you write about on your blog want to drag you into the nearest closet just like you see on Grey’s Anatomy. You better watch out. One of those nurses that you are so fond of may have special plans for you on Valentine’s Day.

No, that is NOT me blushing. I, um, just have some red stuff on my face. Ketchup from lunch or something. I do not blush! I am a very manly very hot medic. Cough.

Yesterday I undertook an interesting experiment in human psychology. Cambridge is a funny place. Everyone's under so much stress to perform; medical students with glasses thicker than A-Level Statistics textbooks, lecturers who sacrifice time, hairlines and contact with sunlight to stick in their labs waiting for a breakthrough, and porters who double up as riot police every night as the college bar empties. So sometimes all it takes to drive people over the edge is a small relatively mundane occurrence.

Like a little bit of snow.

King's College Great Gate

Now I know places where it snows so much that it's nothing to laugh about *ducks to avoid Eskimo whaling spear* but it NEVER snows in Cambridge, so when it does, things go a little cuckoo. The widescreen madness started at about 8.30am at the Great Gate of Trinity College, where amidst desperate medics on bicycles skidding in the streets and crashing into restaurants, a bunch of mathematicians suddenly lost their inhibitions (hey, normal people lose it when they get drunk, mathmos lose it when it snows. Who knows what goes on in their heads? --Ed) and started a snowball fight. Out came one of the porters to see what all the ruckus was, and BAM went a snowball to his face.

He then went back into the Porters' Lodge, summoned the other porters, and following standard University procedure in dealing with snowball-throwing mathmos, started a snowball fight with them.

Trinity mathmos finally lose it. Spot the tourist desperately trying to get away.

I myself skipped lectures and spent the day doing the tourist thing, outsnapping even the hordes of Japanese tourists thronging King's Parade. Taking a cue from the Bohemian Road Nurse, I enclose some of the more interesting shots I took along my travels:

Tourists snapping away on King's College Chapel, right before a porter came and kicked them off the lawn.

A Jesus College student risking expulsion, beheading, hanging and any number of other archaic punishments in the University Constitution to build a snowman on Chapel Court lawns before the porters catch him.

Jesuan students risk the wrath of Trinity College porters to build a snowman on Trinity College lawns (because everyone knows Trinity snow is more "legendary" than Jesus snow.)

"This is the best damn snow in the South of England. I only step on the best snow, y'hear? And this is the best snow. It's Trump Snow. We should charge people to step on it."