I am in hospital now. I almost wasn't. They rang me at 3.35pm to panic about the latex allergy and threatened to postpone the operation. I swore at them. Eventually they found the results of the blood test i had in Jan 04 - how come they finally turned up? which were negative. So they seem to be assuming that i'm not allergic to latex, so if i die that'll be why. hooray.
this is a very non-optimal way of posting and besides, it's going home with richard. so he will post tomorrow.