Unhospitable July 2003

Alternative Investments faces a gruelling quandary: should he allow sickly Salamandans to use his vast private medical centre?

I was always a sickly child, readers. As a boy on the family estate in Buckminsterfullerine, Buckinghamshire, my abiding memories are of always being tucked up in bed with some hideous ailment or another. Warm summer days would be spent indoors, with mother holding an ice pack to my head, as the sweet aroma from her pipe wafted around the room. The noise of my young friends outdoors, beating the servants for sport, would bring a tear to my eye because I could not join them.

Occasionally one of the weaker members of the house staff would be brought to my quarters, and I would kick them feebly in the buttocks, but it wasn’t the same.

Now, of course, I am in vigorously good health, partly due to the various animal organs I have had transplanted into my body over the years. Outrageous riches certainly have their compensations. Nevertheless, the entire north wing of my Salamandan home has been converted into a vast private hospital - with over 50 wards – that I keep on hand should I feel a sniffle coming on.

Trouble, however, is afoot. Salamander has been infected by a mystery virus.

According to my chief physician Malarious Lefever, the condition is known locally as Dongle-Dongle, and symptoms include the flaming ab-dabs, the heebie-jeebies and unexplained tennis elbow.

It all sounds mighty unpleasant to me. Annoyingly, the majority of those afflicted come from the workforce employed to build my massive new home on the banks of the Rio Fernandizo. It has spread to the villages where the poor blighters live. Worse, Malarious informs me that he’d like to treat the workers in the state-of-the-art Dongle-Dongle emergency room of my private hospice, currently empty, and with 40 specialist staff idle.

I’d gladly oblige, but then Malarious drops the bomb. “Course, old boy,” he mutters darkly, “if you do, the chances of you falling pray to the condition will be at least doubled.” The thought of lying immobilised, cursing wildly and clutching my elbow in the midst of a Dongle-Dongle attack chills me to the core.

What’s more, the locals here have always believed in their own hocus pocus medicine, and the doctor is the most valued profession on the island. It’s very much eye-of-bat, nose-of-badger type therapy, so no wonder it’s not curing the problems. So will they really want treating here? And can I afford to fall ill? The impact on our fragile, only recently restored economy would be huge, should something happen to me. All this on top of new employment rights being demanded by those fit enough to work.
The work on my second home is grinding to a halt and I feel helpless. I decide to turn to the one fellow who can truly offer some perspective: my manservant Farouk.

A Salamandan himself, his own brother, Thaddeus is suffering from the new plague. We bring him into the hospital and isolate him. Thaddeus is drained by the Dongle fits: pale and drawn, he keeps insisting that he doesn’t even like tennis. He appeals to let his colleagues into my pristine facility. At the end of the day, it’s a case of my love for the Salamandan people against the economic and personal repercussions of getting ill. I simply can’t decide now. Next month, maybe...

Alternative Investmentsandfarouk@yahoo.co.uk