Soak in the news, reach for your BP machine

The sordid events this week were more than enough to keep the body's mercury soaring

The other day a friend of mine declined a second cup of coffee. My blood pressure is high, he said. I snickered at him for a bit before admitting that mine might be too. He said that if I didn’t see a doctor, he would tell my mother. I said I’d already told her, so nyahnyahnyah. Our maturity counts were clearly still low, but he made me go upstairs and fetch the sphygmomanometer, technically known as “that BP measuring thingy”. 

Neither of us liked our first results, so we made it best of three. Another friend joined us just as