Whatever next? Self-service triage?

LIFE gets dafter. First there was the coincidence linking an Indian professor in Louisiana with a Derby man on top of a Japanese volcano. Then the self-service reminder that the 21st century is leaving me ever more bewildered.
I’d been to Bemrose School to arrange a trip around the old place for my pal Subrata Dasgupta – he’s in Derby this weekend, visiting from the States – and while I was there, I thought about another old mate, Stan Guy. That wasn’t the coincidence because Stan used to live opposite Bemrose.
No, back in the office I was about to e-mail Subrata to tell him that his saunter down memory lane was in place, when my in-box pinged. And there was an e-mail from Stan. And it was to tell me that he had been thinking of me. Apparently, I flashed into his mind while he was on top of an active volcano, phoning the Polish lady who looks after his London house when he’s away.
Said Stan: “We were down in Kyushu when Mount Aso decided to rumble. I thought that the idea of an Englishman in Japan up a volcano spewing poisonous gases (the volcano that is, not me) telephoning a Pole in England might be useful for your column.”
Well it is. And I’m grateful.
I’ve told you before about Stan. Back in the early 1950s, we were both at Becket School in Gerard Street. After Derby Technical College, Stan joined the Foreign Office, worked for MI5, became an international banker, married a Japanese girl, and then started writing best-selling crime fiction set in Japan. Someone should turn him into a television series.
Subrata’s is also a great story. He’s a professor of cognitive science (no, I don’t know what that means, either) at a university in Lafayette. And he also writes books. Admittedly, ones that I have no hope of understanding, lofty works with titles like The Bengal Renaissance: Identity and Creativity from Rammohan Roy to Rabindranath Tagore, and Design Theory and Computer Science.
But also a wonderful memoir called Salaam Stanley Matthews, in which he fondly recalls his days at Bemrose School in the 1950s. So that is why, this Friday, together with his lovely wife, Mitu, we are going to take a stroll around our old school building before meeting up with more Old Bems for a drink or two.
Then this Saturday, from 11 am at the Derby Museum Shop in the Strand, a new book, The History of Bemrose School 1930-2005, is launched. So it’s a real blast of nostalgia for me this week.
Not like when I went to our doctor’s surgery a few days ago. Things there have now moved into the space age.
True, it’s been a long time since the waiting room was full of sick people, wheezing in a fug of cigarette smoke, trying to work out how many fellow sufferers were ahead of them in those days before the appointments-only service (you now need to know in advance if you are going to be ill).
But last week, I was confronted by something called a touch-screen. You tell it whether you are male or female, and your birthday. Then it asks you to confirm that you are Anton Rippon (not every time, obviously; only if it’s likely to be me). And, when you’ve done that, it tells you which doctor you’re seeing and the time of your appointment.
Whatever next? Self-service triage?
Imagine it: “Touch one of the following: Backache or headache? Sneezing or diarrhoea? Sweating or shivering? Right, you’ve got the ’flu. Go home and take two aspirins.”
Maybe that’s cognitive science. I’ll ask Subrata when I see him.