Christmas special: sporties versus foodies

Ho ho hello and welcome to another Christmas edition of my blog.

Once again, my editor has cruelly dismissed my “compilation” idea that radio and TV shows seem to get away with at this time of year (picking the best words from my previous blogs, mixing them up and printing the result). As a result, I’m stuck with… I mean, overjoyed, at the opportunity to talk to you all again at this festive juncture.

Hopefully, you’re reading this in a brief lull between eating and watching TV, or in a quiet moment in the strange twilight zone between Christmas and new year. If you’re on call, I sincerely hope the on-call gods are being kind to you and you manage to find some time to raise a glass with friends, even if it’s only a glass of Pepsi Max.

Which side of the divide?

I thought this tinsel-tinged time may be a good time for introspection: it’s time to ask yourself exactly what kind of person you are.

I’m not talking about the traditional things that divide us – such as religion, sexuality and politics. No, I’m talking about a fundamental split at the core of your veterinary being – are you a foodie or sporty?

It’s not a division I was aware of prior to taking up my post as a resident of clinical pathology, but in the months since, the vastness of this silent divide between us all has become apparent. You can find out where you lie on this apparently unbridgeable gap by asking yourself how you would describe the following mass on a clinical pathology submission form, without using any measurements in your description:

A soft 5cm diameter SC mass.

Go on. Give it a try.

Here’s how you know

Did you describe the mass as “tangerine-sized”? You’re a foodie. If you said ”golf ball-sized”, you’re sporty. Even if you didn’t use those exact items, I bet they were either food-related or sports-related.

It seems to be a hitherto undiscovered law of veterinary medicine. The full list of the most common for the uninitiated are pictured.

Really small masses can be a problem – peanuts, raisins or sultanas work well for the foodies, but there isn’t much that works for the sporties here, although half a marble is occasionally used out of sheer desperation.

Roads less travelled, but occasionally encountered, include avocados and mangoes for the foodies, and hockey puck and medicine ball for the sporties.

Once a sporty…

I’m not sure what the division says about you, but it seems to be hardwired – once a foodie, always a foodie, no matter how much more appropriate a snooker ball would be for the mass you’re describing.

I suspect sporties may be the sort of character with long lists of sporting achievements on their CV (including clambering up Kilimanjaro – this appeared so frequently on the CVs I used to review in my old job that I started to think you wouldn’t be able to approach the famous African mountain without tripping over a veterinary student), whereas foodies are the ones who make it clear on their CV that if you employ them, you won’t be short of beautifully crafted cakes anytime in future.

As for myself?

I’m neither a sporty or foodie – my finest sporting achievement is escaping from having my head flushed down the toilet in secondary school, while my culinary skills are just above Pot Noodle level.

Boringly, I would tend to describe masses with their actual dimensions on submission forms, although in my head, the sliding scale goes from data crystal to Jedi holocron, through to thermal detonator, training remote and Imperial interrogator droid…

Maybe the division says more about us than I’d like to think?

Regardless of whether you’re a foodie, sporty, measurer or one of the rare random object describers (stapler, light bulb, eraser… maybe there’s a stationary subset of us?), I hope you’re having a wonderful, relaxed and peaceful time, or that those times await you in the future, and I hope Santa got you all the apricots, pool balls and lightsabers you were hoping for.

Merry Christmas!