I’m on the train to Doncaster sitting by two doctors: one English, one American. They’re married to each other. They’re on their way to a wedding.
“The last time I was at a wedding I had to resuscitate someone,” she says.
“What happened?,” I ask.
“Oh, he was choking, I mean properly choking,” she says, as if fake choking is common.
Somehow the subject changes.
“Are you going to donate your body to science?” she asks her husband.
He doesn’t really answer. She relays a story from when she was at medical school.
“The first thing they asked us to do was work out the cause of death,” she says,“my corpse had a hole going through one side of its head, and out the other… and I thought, ‘Well I know what happened here’.”
“Gosh,” I say.
“But it turns out that’s how they hung the bodies!”
“Like on a meat hook,” she continues.
I haven’t eaten. I no longer plan to.