Barts Hospital

Barts has always felt like a safe and familiar place to me. Its grand buildings and crumbling interiors are where I spent a lot of my undergraduate years. I sat exams in the old pathology museum, examined prosthetic rectums in the seminar rooms, got roaring drunk in the Great Hall, and received my finals results here, after a long and anxious wait eased slightly by whisky smuggled out of the Butcher's Hook and Cleaver. My favourite tutors had their offices here, people without whom I would not have coped at times. In recent years I have become the tutor, and often teach in the lecture halls and seminar rooms in which I struggled away for years. I always feels safe and nostalgic here.

Today, Barts takes on a different meaning. It is the place my dad receives treatment for the cancer which he will not survive. This week, it is the place he was admitted urgently, the most unwell he's been since his diagnosis two and a half years ago. My worlds collide when I sometimes visit him on the day unit on my way to a lecture or meeting.

I wonder how I will see this place in the future, after he is gone. Barts means so much to me in very different ways.