... with an ear infection, in my hotel room, in Potsdam. Not sure I'll be able to fly home. Ear feels like it will explode. Antibiotics and sympathy needed. In large quantities.
update: Went to a doctor, who said I should not fly and that I needed antibiotics. But rather than just write out a prescription, he wanted to refer me to a 'specialist'. So I crossed town to another doctor, who looked like a caricature of an ageing German doctor (he was all three of those - I can vouch for that, although to be honest, I did not solicit a translation of his medical certificates). Caricature was completed by the sight of what looked to me like the instruments of extreme torture. I quickly decided that if he so much as looked at, let alone picked up, the things that looked like the medical equivalent of pliers I'd run away. So I sat meekly as he picked up the plier-like things and proceeded to stick them up my nose. It wasn't so bad. He said my ears and nose were very nice, and that I could fly, and did not need antibiotics. So I proceeded to Berlin, and then back here to York, without antibiotics but with masses of (probably undeserved) sympathy. So it wasn't all bad, and have decided that sympathy is a good thing, and at least as good as beer, if not more so.
