The first time I saw a dead body
I was in hospital, aged 20, recovering from blood poisoning from a cat bite and on Intra-veinous anti-biotics (there’s a funny story about that I’ll save for another time).

For some reason I was on a ward full of old people because that was the only place they could find to put me.

One morning I woke up to see an old man, a World War One veteran no less, sat up in bed staring at me. I returned his gaze with a smile; he kept staring, and staring, and staring. I watched him carefully for about 5 minutes, and unless he blinked at exactly the same time as me, he didn’t blink at all (I put that to the test with some random blink-testing).

I then noticed the other old bloke in the bed next to him looking at me, “dead ‘int he?” he said, “um” I said, “yeah, dead, I’ve been watching him for ages now”. He then pressed the nurse call button, “Nurse, he’s dead” he said pointing at him, “and get us a cup of tea would ya?”. The nurse quickly examined the old dead man, tutted and drew the curtains around him; she walked off shaking her head and came back 5 minutes later with a cup of tea for me, it was the worst morning of my life, I wanted Coffee.
(Whippet, Fri 29 Feb 2008, 21:04, Reply)