Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas by Adam Kay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not as good as the predecessor but still good enough to read. It’s as though as the publishers gave Kay a call to say, “We need a book for Xmas and we’ll pay you handsomely. Any chance you could scrape together some anecdotes that didn’t make it in the first book?” Ok, that’s a bit mean. I think the problem with this book is, there’s no narrative like in the first one. It’s just a lose collection of anecdotes that don’t go anywhere.

The book was also very short.

I once asked a medical student to shave a patient before an ECG. Fuck knows what the poor patient thought was happening when the student came into his cubicle, removed his five o’clock shadow and tidied up his sideburns.

‘You didn’t ask the right questions,’ he says, every syllable a dunce’s cap thudding onto my head. ‘You see, 99 per cent of the time you’ll get the answer by taking a thorough history, before you even lay a hand on the patient.’
‘Have you recently been using a candy cane as a dildo?’
Of course! I’ll add that to my list of icebreakers.

A couple of paediatric nurses are running around, recruiting volunteers to be Santa for an hour or two in the grotto they’re running in outpatients.I make my excuses. ‘But . . . I’m Jewish!’
‘The kids won’t know!’ the nurse replies, then pauses. ‘Assuming you’re not planning on showing them your penis?’

I drive back home myself, five hours later and two hours late, covered in fluids that would give the most specialist fetish clubs in Berlin a run for their money

This is as close to fame as I’m likely to get: I’m never going to appear on Big Brother – if I wanted to share a sweaty dorm with people whose mental age was twelve I’d have become a scoutmaster.

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