As our group all brought their reading of Bram Stoker‘s Dracula to the Century’s End literature session today, wife Barbara was at the local hospital undergoing the ordeal of multiple medical staff trying for 3 hours to find a vein into which blood could be transfused. You couldn’t make it up, as they say. This was the preliminary procedure to a predicted 6 hour transfusion session. Eventually a vein was located by a cancer ward expert and half the planned dose of A+ was administered. That happens to be my group too so perhaps we have shared blood now as I have donated plenty to date over the years. We await a further bloody appointment. As for the lecture and discussion, many of the usual topics for this work were covered – homoeroticism, fear of invasion, racism, feminism, the Oscar Wilde connection, earlier and later gothic fiction, Freud, hysteria and the wonderful wolves. Along with a fairly unanimous appreciation of the quality of the writing apart from a few minor glitches.