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Every Monday morning, at seven fifty-eight, I take up position at the kitchen table like a man expecting a siege.
Two handsets, both charged, both tested.
The landline on my left, because landlines apparently still queue you differently to mobiles, a piece of folklore I have never verified and refuse to test in case it turns out to be nonsense and I have to admit I've built two years of strategy on nonsense.
The mobile on my right, redial finger cocked, thumb hovering the way I imagine snooker players hover before a shot they've already taken four hundred times in their head.
I do not do this for fun.
I want to be clear about that, because from the outside it looks like a hobby, and I resent the implication. I do this because the surgery opens its phone lines at eight o'clock precisely, there are, by my estimation, roughly four hundred people in this town who also want an appointment, and there are eleven bookable slots.
Eleven.
I've never seen the number written down anywhere, I've simply deduced it through two years of forensic engagement-tone analysis, the way a submariner reads the sea through sonar alone.
Engaged tone at 8:00:03 means the queue's already full. Ringing tone at 8:00:03 means you're in with a chance, though "in with a chance" still generally means fourth in a queue behind three other people who also treated eight o'clock like the parting of the Red Sea.
At sixty-eight I am not, by any reasonable measure, a competitive man any more. I gave up competing for things that mattered a long time ago — promotion, respect, the last word in an argument I already knew I'd lost.
But hand me a phone and an engaged tone and something primal wakes up in me, something that once stood on a bridge in a Force 9 gale and thought, right, we'll see about that.
I have never once, not once in two years, admitted to anyone that I book online. I don't book online. It's not that I can't — I know exactly how, I watched a video about it, twice — it's that I've decided, on principle, that the phone is the correct and proper channel, and if the system's designed to defeat me then I shall simply out-endure the system, the way you out-endure weather.
Which is, I recognise even as I type it, an extraordinary position to have arrived at.
I have turned a receptionist's rota into a matter of personal honour.
Somewhere along the way "get a doctor's appointment" quietly became "prove something," and I genuinely couldn't tell you when, or prove something to whom, since nobody at the surgery has any idea I'm doing it.
They just see a man who rings at eight and sometimes gets through and sometimes doesn't. The competition, such as it is, has an audience of exactly one, and he's very invested.
Last Monday I got the engaged tone eleven times in ninety seconds.
Eleven.
I know because I counted, out loud, in the empty kitchen, like a darts commentator narrating a losing streak nobody asked him to narrate. On the twelfth attempt it rang. I actually said "yes" to nobody.
Then the ringing stopped and a recorded voice told me the surgery was now closed for booking and to try again tomorrow, which is when I discovered — two years in — that Mondays apparently have a shorter booking window than the rest of the week, a fact that has presumably been printed on a laminated sign in the surgery reception since 2019, a sign I have never once read because reading it would mean walking in and asking, and asking would mean losing.
I was midway through attempt thirteen when a sixteen-year-old showed up looking for her nan’s secateurs……
What she did with my phone in the next ten minutes, and what it cost me to admit it, is where this one actually goes.
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