When I was a young child I thought that the building where you visited the doctor was called “The Hell Centre”.
It wasn’t that I had a particularly negative view of the medical profession: my mum was a nursing sister who worked in the hospital next door. Neither did I associate “The Hell Centre” with any fire-and-brimstone images that I might have had of hell.
It was just that I had mis-heard the pronunciation of “health centre”—the ‘th’ sound had run into the ‘s’ of ‘centre’: hell thcentre—and so I just accepted that that was what it was called, in the same way that I had accepted that an apple was an apple and a cat was a cat.
I sometimes wish I could still accept things that easily without questioning them. I wonder why that is…