. . . I digress
Unhappy with the toilets?
What struck me most wasn’t the appalling punctuation - random commas and a spattering of apostrophes seem to be the NHS house style, and this wasn’t the worst example I found - but the unctuous tone of the thing.
It wasn’t my civic duty to politely bring to the attention of the people responsible for the cleanliness of the public loos the fact that something was amiss. Not any more. Now it’s about my “unhappiness”, a personal, private sentiment that may or may not have anything to do with the objective amount of Jiff I can smell in the toilets. I am regarded as a being that emotes, a helpless thing swayed by squirts of internal juices, at the mercy of fleeting subjective assessments of my private state of felicity, and not as a rational grown up who can tell if a toilet is not up to scratch and has the capacity to communicate responsibly to the cleaning staff - oh, sorry, the Patient Environment Team.
As it happens the place was spotless, just as it should be. But I still left unhappy. I wonder if there is a Patient Language Team to whom I can report my melancholy.
