A not especially fictionalised account of my last trip to give blood

"Hey", I texted, "Remember we're going to see the nhs vampires this afternoon to give blood..."

My sister was coming with me. It was her first time. As we walked to the church hall where the blood service generally set up, she peppered me with questions, mostly along the lines of "Will it hurt?"

I decided not to tell her about the time when they put the needle too close to my nerve and it made my whole arm go fizzy, so that they had to abort the donation.

When we got there, we witnessed an extraordinary demonstration of bureacracy. In the last couple of years, the blood service has introduced an appointment system. Before I'd always forgotten to make an appointment, but this time, feeling virtuous, I rang up a week before the day in question and tried to make appointments for the two of us. I was told there weren't any left, but I could go along anyway and they would fit us in.

Having got there at 5.50pm, we were informed that they now like people to have appointments, so we should make one and come back (goodness knows why I couldn't do this in advance over the phone). The next two slots in a row were at 7.10 and 7.15. Luckily, our friends live round the corner from the church so we holed up there for an hour and came back.

I sat for a while in one row of seats, while my sister (because it was her first time) sat in a different row.

Then I was called up and had the usual test for anaemia before the nurse asked me about my the months I spent travelling last year. Not just out of friendliness (though friendly she was) but to try and establish when I had last been in a malarial area. I moved onto yet another row of seats and was followed there by a different nurse who asked me to tell her where exactly I'd been in China. I tried to explain and she tried to write it down, but unsurprisingly got stuck on a couple of names. It's hard to say "Would you like me to spell that for you?" without sounding patronising, I find. Eventually she got a map and I'd only been to the light pink areas, not the dark pink areas, so I passed whatever test it was.

The next test came when I was lying down, having the blood drained from my arm. They've made a new addition to the machines that slowly rock the bags of blood backwards and forwards; a red light on a white stick at about eye level when you're lying down. I didn't notice this until it started blinking - a vaguely alarming thing to happen when you have a needle in your arm. Eventually a nurse informed me that it was blinking because I wasn't squeezing and releasing my hand hard enough.

Basically, I was bleeding too slowly - a tendency one might be grateful for in different circumstances. I squeezed and released with gusto and the light duly stopped blinking. A few minutes later, the nurse returned and told me, "Well done, you're really doing well now," without a trace of irony. I struggled to find a sense of achievement in my rate of haemorrhaging.

About five minutes after that, the light started up again, so I renewed my squeezing and releasing efforts only to be told by another nurse (there were a lot of them about, it's a military operation) that this time the light meant I was finished.

There then followed lemon squash and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps - the cheap kind that taste like industrial cleaner and monosodium glutomate. Just as I was finishing, the woman next to me at the refreshments table felt faint and had to be laid down on a bed with her legs up in the air. The poor woman was still having feeling woozy twenty minutes later when my sister finished her donation.

Luckily we got away without incident and I even managed to make an appointment for next time (not until July), so assuming I don't forget between now and then, the whole process should take slightly less than the two and a half hours it took this time round.