Well I'm back from my Transrectal Prostate Ultrasound Scan, and to be honest, it wasn't quite the barrel of laughs I was anticipating. The only rib-tickling aspect was when he stuck the probe in deeper than he meant to. At the time, I thought the forty-five minute wait was the worst part. There's something slightly unsettling about watching balding middle-aged men in gowns come and go through a set of double doors, until you're eventually left alone in the waiting room with all their wives.

But as it turned out, sitting on a hard chair for three quarters of an hour was the most comfortable part. Before I knew it, I was curled up on a hospital bed, stripped from the waist down (apart from my socks, which I naturally chose to keep on), while a doctor violated me with an electric cattle prod attached to a TV. Frankly if you're going to have a lie-down in a darkened room, there are definitely more relaxing ways to do it.

But still, no pain, no gain. And if someone's going to make you feel physically sick, you might as well be in a hospital at the time. So after some of the longest few minutes of my life, the radiologist looked me straight in the buttocks, and informed me that no, I don't have an abscess. So we're none the wiser about why the prostatitis keeps coming back. I probably just broke a mirror a couple of years ago.

But in other news, I've just visited this place...


That's the Ouse Valley Medical Practice. It's nowhere near the Ouse and isn't in a valley, but apart from that, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

I wasn't actually intending to go there, but sometimes in life you find yourself sitting in the Diabetes Centre at 9am, looking at your appointment list, and about to call your first patient, when one of your colleagues comes rushing in and asks you to drop the eye drops and immediately drive twenty miles to Handcross. Our computer there had lost the will to live, and as the only screener with a nearby car, I had to make a mercy dash up the A23 with a replacement laptop before all the patients revolted.

I got there forty minutes later expecting pitchforks and burning torches. What I found was possibly the nicest surgery I've ever been to. I don't know what's going on in mid-Sussex, but while Brighton suffers with pokey practices and shoebox surgeries, Handcross, a village with a population of less than a thousand, has the kind of newly-built computerised palace that could house them all. I haven't seen anything like it since... well, since I visited the tiny village of Hurstpierpoint.

But what sets Ouse Valley apart from the competition is their fantastic naming of the building above. Never mind the Bird in Eye Surgery in Uckfield, Handcross have the Dumbledore Primary Care Centre. I expect the senior partner's Dr Potter.