Storm Ingrid is punishing us today. We have barely cleared up from the last unnamed storm of earlier this week.

“Storm Ingrid is punishing us today”

This phrase came from a weather report but it made me laugh for an entirely different reason.

I used to work in a children’s hospital in Brighton. It was everything you might imagine such a place to be, the staff were dedicated and lovely as you might expect in such a place.

One of our Medical Secretaries called Ingrid was also a much in demand local dominatrix. She enlivened tea breaks with her stories of  her additional occupation. Sometimes she would  slip out during her lunchbreak, do some dominating and come back. We could sometimes spot if she had been servicing a foot fetishist because she returned to work in a different colour tights. She sold worn tights as part of her lunchtime deal.

For a little while we had an Australian radiologist who had recently retired from providing radiology services to remote areas of Australia. It had been an interesting but at times lonely career. Living and working in Brighton was somewhat of an eye opener for him. Ingrid took him under her wing in all sorts of ways. Sometimes he would go off with her for lunch. He was unaware that we all knew what her sideline was. After ‘lunch’ with Ingrid he would return to work late and flustered. His mood unpredictable for the first part of the afternoon.

” Ingrid has been punishing him’ was our code for leaving him alone reporting in a darkened room.

After a few months he moved back to Australia. His retirement tour of the U.K finished after only one city. We never saw Ingrid again…