At the end of the week I headed straight off on holiday, heady with the prospect of a whole week’s holiday with my lovely family in Cornwall. Every year Mum, Dad, Ross and I go to the same little cottage in the Camel Valley Vineyard in north Cornwall and have a lazy fortnight pottering around beaches, walking the dogs, looking at holiday cottages and filling up with cream teas at Viv’s cafe down the road.
This year I couldn’t wait. The last few months had been non-stop, so a complete break from rotations, electives, work experience and the whole vet package was a wonderful prospect. But no, wait, hadn’t I agreed that the TV crew could come and do some filming? Was I mad?
It was too late to back out, so I just had to hope that having the film crew around wouldn’t mean too much disruption to our precious break.
In the end it was fine. The crew that came along were the two I knew well from our equine fortnight, Amy and Sam, and they didn’t arrive until the Wednesday, so we had three whole days to ourselves first.
There’s a dairy farm next to where we stay and over the years I had become friends with the owners. The current farmer, Tom, was eight years older than me and he’d taken over the running of the farm from his dad several years earlier. I did some work experience with them when I was sixteen and I’d been dropping by every summer since, so Tom and I had become good friends and he’d agreed that the crew could do some filming on the farm.
Tom is a country man through and through. All he ever wanted was to take over the family farm and to keep things just as they had always been. He loved the quiet life, running the farm and then going to the pub for a pint in the evenings. With my thirst for adventure we were very different, but he was a joker who made me laugh and I liked lending a hand when I was down there.
This summer Tom proudly showed me the trailer he had bought to fit behind the tractor. The idea was that it would pick up the cut grass and save him doing it by hand. Except that what Tom showed me was, as far as I could see, a pile of rusty junk.
‘What do you think?’ he said, eyes gleaming with triumph.
‘Um, it looks as though it might need a bit of work doing on it.’
‘Yes, I know, but never mind that, I’ll soon sort it out. And it was a bargain at £800.’
I peered at the trailer, with its rusting sides, dodgy wooden flooring and rotting chains.
‘I’m sure it will be great when you get it going, Tom.’
‘Course it will. Real beauty this, it’s going to save me hours of work.’
To be fair, he did get it going. He worked on it for a week and eventually it cranked into action and rattled along behind the tractor, flicking at least some of the grass into the back before grinding to a halt. A thump and a kick and it would reluctantly be off again, until the next stop, but despite its lacklustre performance and dubious charms, Tom remained delighted with it and was convinced that it was a bargain.
When Amy and Sam arrived on the farm they decided to shoot a dreamy (and I thought cheesy, but I kept quiet) segment of me walking through a herd of cows and then sitting down on the grass to admire the view. Unfortunately, however, I hadn’t slept much the night before, and each time the camera panned around for a close-up shot of my face, my eye twitched convulsively, making me look more Hunchback of Notre-Dame than dewy-eyed young vet.
Giving up on that footage, they waited until the next day and joined us in the farmyard, where I was helping Tom ‘dry off’ some cows in the dairy parlour, which meant putting teat sealants in those cows that needed a few milk-free months before giving birth to another calf and starting the cycle again. As the camera panned in I concentrated hard on the teats of the cow I was under, trying to do a perfect job, but unfortunately I didn’t think about where my head was and I head-butted the cow on the hock so hard that my head was left throbbing. Despite the pain I tried to ignore what had just happened and carry on but, unbeknown to me, I had cow dung smeared across my forehead, which didn’t exactly make for a flattering bit of footage.
Third time lucky, we all hoped. The following day Amy decided they would film me with Tosca on the beach. What could be simpler than a little sequence of me playing with the family dog? Tosca, despite being blind, still had a springer spaniel attitude. In other words, she was a big ball of non-stop energy. I really hoped she would be reasonably calm and play her part, but with the scent of the sea in her nostrils she became wildly excited, tugging and jerking on her lead so that it twisted round my hand and I yelped in pain. ‘Try squatting down beside her and giving her a cuddle,’ suggested Amy.
I tried, pleading with Tosca to behave and just sit patiently for two minutes while we both stared out to sea. But Tosca wasn’t having it; she bounded off into the waves, blissfully happy and oblivious to her missed opportunity to be a canine star.
Amy decided to cut straight to the family film. Mum wasn’t keen on being filmed, so they went for a shot of me with Dad and Ross on either side. So far so good, and they asked Dad and Ross each to say something about me. Dad was very complimentary, but in true little brother style Ross wasn’t. He and I just couldn’t stop laughing, so yet another unusable piece of film bit the dust. All in all not a good start to my TV career!
I spent a final evening with Tom, enjoying a bottle of wine beside a fire in his backyard, talking about life and laughing about the filming. Despite our different takes on life I really liked Tom and I was sad to say goodbye for another year.
After we drove back from Cornwall I had one more relaxed Sunday before starting two weeks in anaesthesia, a rotation I was absolutely dreading. I did a bit of last-minute cramming, the names of all the different anaesthetic drugs blurring before my eyes and my panic levels rising, before giving up and nipping over to Grandma and Grandpa next door for a calming cup of tea.
Mum’s parents have always been a mainstay in my life. They’ve lived next door to us all our lives, and when Ross and I were little and our parents were working they picked us up from school and fed us wickedly delicious food like chicken nuggets and Grandpa’s amazing creamy mash or, our favourite of all, custard with chocolate drops sprinkled over it. We had some lovely times; Grandpa used to take me to the park to find a goose feather, bring it home and cut it into shape and then use it as a quill to teach me calligraphy. And Grandma taught me how to make melt-in-your-mouth scones and crunchy gingerbread men.
As I hugged them goodbye and piled my bags back into the car I thanked my lucky stars for my generous, supportive family.
CHAPTER EIGHT
We’d been told that the anaesthesia rotation would make even the toughest vet student cry. Rumour had it that the clinicians were merciless, the drugs impossible to figure out and the operations interminable. So I arrived at the Queen Mother Hospital at eight o’clock on a morning in late August feeling extremely nervous. I felt sure that I knew absolutely nothing and was going to fall flat on my face.
To make matters worse, the TV crew were coming to film me at work for the first time. After the slapstick carry-on of our holiday shoots, I could only hope that this wouldn’t be a disaster, too.
Thankfully, two of the other students were also being filmed. Grace was by now a bit of an old hand in front of the cameras, and so was Charlie. He was in our sister rotation group, the one that was doing more or less the same order of rotations and had been with us in Wales. They joined us again for anaesthesia
