Every now and then something happens, or several things happen, that make you feel entirely confident that, really, life is great, people are generally wonderful, and the world around you is beautiful. Actually, maybe it's the drugs. But anyway, sometimes tiny things of absolutely no significance just make you feel nice. These things are:

1. Missing my bus a few days ago because I was so fascinated by the pigeons copulating on the pavement that I didn't flag it down.
2. Getting a huge hug from a very inebriated Irish guy at the shelter, because I correctly guessed that he was named after Francis of Assisi.
3. Waking up to find the sun streaming in through the window and blue sky.
4. Ringing the Home Office and having them sort out a crisis in a record time of TWO MINUTES!!!

Yeah, on second thoughts, I'm sure it's the drugs.

But before you worry that I have become some sort of hippy or slipped into sentimentalist drivel, I do have a rant, and today's rant is a big one!!

Something else that should have made me feel fuzzily happy (if light-headedly so) in a smug sort of way is giving blood, which I've done on several occasions entirely successfully. So yesterday I mooched off to do it again, and that lovely organisation that is the National Bloody Service told me off then poisoned me.
I know a lot of people who boycott the Blood Service on account of their outdated, bordering-on-homophobic donor policies, but I have always been of the opinion that the Blood Service being arseholes is not the fault of people unfortunate enough to require blood transfusions, so have given them my blood anyway. But I am never doing it again.

Am ranting here partly in the hope that my seething fury will somehow translate into some sort of coherent order so that I can write a letter to the Blood Service:

First of all, I was told off by one Dr Lima for not filling the form in incorrectly. I mean properly told off. I had ticked the "no" box for a question that began "for men only". I maintain the answer is still "no" since I have not had anal sex, and am not a man. I could hvae understood her worrying if I had put "yes". But she didn't see it this way: "Why did you tick that? Hmm? Why? You're not a man! Did you not read it? It's a very important form, you know. You MUST read it properly. Now I'm going to have to ask you to sign this to say that you made a mistake." Evidently having to get me to do this ruined her day, but I wasn't too worried as she seemed to be telling off most of her staff too. Afterwards she told me off for having low iron, which obviously is entirely my own fault, in fact I went in explicitly to piss them off on account of my low iron. She hummed and haaed for a while as to whether I could give blood at all, and I expect this was the reason for the resulting fuss.

Giving blood, as always, was fine, though I was unimpressed with my time of 5 minutes 20 seconds (last time I was a whole minute faster!) I got up to leave and was told off again because I hadn't gone to the "recovery area", where they made me lie down, even though everyone else was sitting at the table. This seemed a little daft not to say a tad melodramatic. I was then ordered to drink "something with sugar in it", and was given a choice of lemon or orange. For some reason I wasn't allowed tea like everyone else. I asked if they had artificial sweetener in them and was told they were ordinary squash.
"In that case, I can't drink them, I'm allergic to sweetener."
"You have to drink."
"Can't I have something else?"
"No, you've been given a choice of orange or lemon."
"But I can't have sweetener. I used to get convulsions as a child and was told not to have it. Now it gives me migraines."
"I can water it down for you."
"That doesn't make any difference. I'm not supposed to have it."
"Well, I'm not letting you leave here until you have a sweet drink."
I felt like a kid that was being told by the school dinner lady "just try one brussels sprout then you can go."
The upshot was I drank half a cup of sickly-sweet whatever-it-was (lemon, purportedly). Later on (and it might have been partially psychosomatic, in which case I'm impressed with the power of my psyche) I had the most impressive aura: a high-pitched whine in the back of my head, a big shadow on the corner of my left eye so i kept thinking I was bumping into something, a strange detatched feeling a bit like when you blow your nose too hard and your ears pop, then pins and needley tingling all down my right hand side (usually it's just my arm but this went all down to my foot). Then I got a headache at the back on the left side of my head, kept losing my balance like you do with a hangover (hmm, must have looked pissed) and, to add to the fun, threw up twice in an hour. Yay!!!

My gripes then, in no particular order:
1. If there was something wrong (low iron or whatever) and this was why they felt i needed a drink, wht didn't they explain it to me?
2. If this was the case, why endanger my health by letting me donate in the first place?
3. Why not believe me when I said I couldn't have aspartame?
4. Why are they even employing someone who thinks that "a little bit" is ok?? Try telling a veggie it's ok if they eat just a tiny bit of meat, or, for that matter, an anaphylactic that it's just "a small peanut". (Actually aspartame is a fairly common migraine trigger.)
5. And anyway, what right have they got to tell me what I can and can't drink? Even if I just didn't like sweet drinks (which as it happens I don't, I don't even have sugar in tea) then they shouldn't have made me drink them. I am an adult, it's my body, it's my decision.

So, in summary: fucking wankers.

If I knew how to and had the time, I would sue the arses off them. Otherwise, if they want my blood, they can go whistle for it. They've just lost a regular donor, who due to their incompetence is now sitting in her office tripping out on Migraleve.