Astonishingly, I'm on holiday. Not that it makes any difference. "Are you really a doctor?" asked the holiday rep in our cheesy hotel, on the Greek island of Shaggos. I could see she was giving me the same look that all my elderly patients give me; a look that says: "Clearly you don't look a day over three years old; but if you say you're a doctor then I suppose I'll have to believe you."

Hastily I parried with my "earnest-but-friendly doctor" facial expression, trying at the same time to maintain a flirtatious smile: for, as is traditional for holiday reps on the island of Shaggos, she was almost offensively attractive and, more importantly, she looked like she was about to furnish me with an opportunity to deploy my immense intellectual prowess, in a sensitive and crowd-pleasingly new-mannish fashion.

"I've got an awful sore throat," she frowned into the sunshine, emphasising (astonishingly) her breasts as she stroked her neck. "And I've got to do Strip Bingo in half an hour." Gosh, I gulped. Strip Bingo. I'd never had someone smoke a cigarette sensuously in front of me while complaining about their sore throat. Gargle with aspirin, I suggested. There was no way I was going to tell her to give up smoking, when she was clearly so good at it.

So you can well imagine what happened next. First I was approached at my sun-lounger by a young family (and if there's anything worse than youthful policemen, it's watching dads getting younger than you). "My daughter," began the man in his early 20s, brandishing a big stick in one hand and a small child in the other, "has developed a strange rash on her fingers, from the fibreglass in this snooker cue."

Cluelessness has been a recurrent theme in my medical career. Most things you can look up if you need to and, more specifically, I spent the whole dermatology course in bed with my girlfriend (dermat-holiday we called it). I smilingly admitted I was clueless, and suggested avoiding the snooker cue in future, but they all gazed at me, worriedly. As if their faith in doctors, medicine, and all western rational and scientific belief systems was waning, because of me.

I back-pedalled, in the name of good public relations for the profession, and lamely suggested some weak steroid cream, if it didn't "clear up later". It was an act of shameless and witch doctorish mystification, I know, but from what little I remember of the subject it was no lamer than what most dermatologists would have come up with under similar circumstances. And more importantly, I was beginning to prepare a short speech in my head. "Look. You can ask me whatever you like, but since I'm on holiday, I'm allowed to be as stupid as I like, OK?"

The sun sank in the sky and I lazily settled in for dinner by the poolside. Halfway through my meal I was presented with a weeping and infected sore in the middle of a huge geordie shin, which had clearly been missing most of its skin for several days.

"I fucked my shin when I was pissed," said the huge geordie attached to the shin, as I took another mouthful of squid. "Now it hurts like shit. Are youse really a doctor?" Barely, I thought to myself, and suggested TCP, which only led to more disappointment. Am I your mother?

So, over the course of the next three days, my rather louche poolside clinic stretched to: a recurring case of gout; disfiguring acne; three banged knees; a bleeding nose; and some rather invigorating concussion that could quite easily have turned very nasty. I suspect, being a rather vain kind of person, that I might have enjoyed the whole thing if I'd had the first clue what to do with any of them, but medical school teaches you about heart attacks, freaky rheumatology drugs and the microscopic appearance of vanishingly rare tumours of the willy. It does not teach you about banged knees.

So that's why, with the realisation that both medical school and house jobs have left me useless as a doctor for proper everyday stuff, I am joining almost everyone else from my year of house officers and doing my first job as a senior house officer in A&E. And here I will deal with this kind of minor crap day in and day out, for six months, until such time as I am very competent and very bored.

In an ideal world, you probably wouldn't have your most inexperienced junior doctors working smack bang on the front line in A&E, seeing every punter out of the ambulance before they get handed over to the real professionals. But there it is: you try getting anyone else to do it, and good luck to you.