Today’s Google celebration
At the weekend I returned to my alma mater, St Thomas’ Hospital in London to re-unite with other survivors of my set who began training together at the Nightingale School.
This is the weekend that is always set aside for such a meeting of the Fellowship because it is the nearest to the birthday, today, of Florence Nightingale who founded the school. It was a joyful and also poignant get-together. Poignant, not just because of the friends who weren’t there and the reuniting with people who see each other rarely but fall into conversation with ease and comfort within about 3 minutes. The other cause is that the school we that nurtured us closed in 1996 when it amalgamated with others at Kings College in the Strand and nursing training was taken away from hospitals. The badge we had to work so hard for and were required to return ‘ultimately’ to the hospital is no longer awarded.
In the central hall, along with the busts of the famous men of St Thomas’ are two display cases with badges returned and the names of the original owners and date of qualifying 1889, 1923, 1948 and more recent. A young workman was sitting on one of the benches and asked me what the “medals” were. I told him about the badge and how long one had to work to win one. He smiled with understanding “Oh yeah” he said. “You mean like McDonald’s”
Now that was fast food for thought.