I came across my original Medical Card today. It revealed to me that I must have spent my first months in Great Granny Kate McKay’s house in the Crossroads area of the Ferry (referred to by Mum as “Little Ireland”) before moving down the road into a tenement flat in the notorious Clark Place (also referred to by Mum as “that rat-infested hovel”) and then into our brand new Council house in Rosebery Avenue (named after the fat, pompous Earl himself). But it also reminded me how lucky I had been back then. Lucky, because I was born in the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh (beneath the clock tower, according to Mum) shortly after the introduction of the National Health Service, which meant that both Mum and I received the best of medical attention – for free. Lucky, too, because (again according to Mum) I was rated by the hospital to be a perfectly healthy and perfectly proportioned baby, scoring 10 out of 10 under the system used by doctors at that time to assess the condition of newborns. But what I wonder would I score nowadays, some seventy years later? A perfect 10? Well, maybe 9 and three-quarters.
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