"Massive fungal infection," said the podiatrist grimly, as he got to work on my sadly decayed plates of meat. And the bunion situation? Critical. Unlike dentists, a haughty profession, none of whom think human beings are fit to be trusted with the possession of their teeth, foot doctors are chummy. The image of Christ, kneeling to wash the beggar, comes to mind as you sit there. Where had my man learned his skills? I asked, as he ground, scraped, massaged and lotioned away at the MFI. In a department of the same place I worked, it emerged. UCL's "Foot Hospital". More chumminess.
The London Foot Hospital School of Podiatric Medicine is a handsome little establishment set among the terraces of Fitzroy Square, a few metres from where Virginia Woolf once lived. Like the nearby Royal Ear Hospital (a whole hospital for monarchic lugs?), it is impossible to pass without an inward smile and mental images of Monty Python's Great Pounding Sole.
"The bastards are closing it down," my foot man told me - giving the corn scraper a vicious little twist. When he said it, I recalled notices around the corridors at UCL: "Save the London Foot Hospital". The plan, apparently, is to transfer all the teaching functions (and teachers) to the University of East London, "against the wishes of the staff".
The move was scheduled to have started last week (staff only learned about it in April). As the notices protest: "We have every reason to believe that the transfer to UEL will be rushed, expensive, and highly counterproductive for staff and students."
As I understand it, a world leader in the treatment of pedal ailments - with all the autonomy of an independent teaching hospital - is destined, in the course of time, to become one of many "units" in a large, streamlined medical factory. You will wander, limpingly, down interminable corridors with little signs directing you to oncology, cardiology, or (shame, shame) genito-urinary, and there, in some far recess, will be podiatry. Feet, after all, come low in the order of things medical (have you ever seen a podiatrist rushing alongside the gurney in ER?). The LFH three-year degree course will be downgraded: phased out, perhaps.
There will be efficiency gains. But expertise on the corn, hammer-toe, ingrown nail, bunion, and those 80-odd bones below the ankle (not to mention my grotty MFI) will be, it is argued, dissipated and, over time, lost altogether.
It is the trend of our time. My own department at UCL, when I joined in the early 70s, had an array of sub-specialisms clinging to it like scholarly limpets: there was a group working on place names, another on folklore, practical bibliography was taught (with a reconstructed Moxon hand press and a bindery). Anglo-Norman, Norse, and History of the Language thrived.
One by one, these annexes to the main subject have been phased out or downgraded. Why? Because the drive for efficiency always strengthens the centre and weakens the periphery. In a few years UCL English department will be teaching Shakespeare and Toni Morrison: end of story.
Thirty years ago, British publishing was characterised by a diversity of small and middle-sized firms: Secker, Chatto, Bodley Head, Cape, Gollancz. Each had its distinctive "house style". Now, out of that rich publishing mosaic, only Faber survives (thanks, one imagines, to the revenues generated by Cats - not something the firm's eminent director, TS Eliot, ever foresaw). The others have been "conglomerated". Whenever a new publishing house, like Fourth Estate, makes a success of itself, it is promptly swallowed up by some vast multinational. The result? The British book trade is more efficient than it was, but the British book is less interesting. Sometimes, one concludes, inefficiency is the greater efficiency.
Anyway, when you take your socks off tonight, spare a thought for the LFH. And, if you feel strongly there is a petition at www.ucl.ac.uk/unions/AUT/lfh.htm .
