A few medical and matrimonial meanderings.

From the uniformed to the uninformed with some words and no pictures, sorry.

I was in traction for my fourth birthday with one of my short legs broken, I’d fallen tragically from a farm gate, only about three feet to ground level, but high enough to land like a small fat Argos glass-swan, so unsurprisingly a bit got broken.

At St Margaret’s hospital in Epping, every morning NHS cornflakes swam in warm milk, and I didn’t talk to the other children, there didn’t seem anything to say and for a while I just looked at the grey ceiling and the medieval arrangement of ropes and pulleys slung there to ensure I didn’t constantly walk in large circles in later life. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve heard, “Look, let’s just forget it, we’re just going round in circles now.” They wouldn’t have been so quick with the insensitive circumferential talk if the stretching hadn’t worked. What actually may have left a more lasting scar occurred when a severely scowling nurse smacked me on my good leg, for looking through my kaleidoscope held up to a night-light and for not being asleep, at that age an unexpected slap from a stranger can feel like being flogged around the fleet. But I suppose if you let one under-five bed-ridden insomniac get away with it, before you know what’s happening you’ve got anarchy. Twenty immobile children banging their plastic beakers on their metal beds and throwing burning teddies into the aisle, while a group of frightened nurses huddle near the door, hurriedly unrolling the fire-hose and the Sister gripping a telephone to her face, shouting, “Lockdown! It's kicked off in Honeysuckle!”

I looked forward obviously not only to my parents evening visit but also to seeing Great-Aunt Hilda, crippled and smiling on the arm of Great-Uncle Sam, making her slow, lop-sided and meandering way down the ward. They were a lovely old couple and my surrogate grandparents, the genuine ones all being either accidentally or otherwise deceased. She invariably brought a box of Cadbury’s chocolate fingers and Rowntrees fruit pastels in a large cardboard cylinder with a green smartie-type lid, things really couldn’t have been better for a short while. I cried when they left but I did secretly after every visiting-time ended, when everyone had gone and I was left with the loneliness of another night and day of hospital routine, hiding behind a comic I couldn’t read and looking through my kaleidoscope. And so the day would pass until families flocked again into the ward, walking as quickly as if the doors had opened on a boxing-day sale of sickly children, smiling and waving from what seemed a long, long way away.

After three months and two days, the plaster-cast was cut away to reveal a pallid limb still attached and I went home, never to face a warm cornflake again, but twenty-four years later, I did face a nurse again; this time through a smitten-mist of admiration. She was Linda: eyes pools of laughter, alabaster cheeks flushed the colour of light-hearted rose petals, smiling hellos, smiling goodbyes, smiling through every adversity even when we kissed, even when we…that wasn’t so good actually. I don’t know whether it was my fault for being so attentive and conspicuously caring but over the space of just three months, the life span of a battery-hen or a Dell laptop battery, our relationship went from mascaraed eye-candied peach to rapidly blueing cadaver. There’s no point in dissecting the irrationality of personality to try to discover reasons for a complete transmogriphication, but quite abruptly the nursing part of her identity took over her completely, and it became clear I was confronting a very different prognosis, one of acute and quite aggressive professionalism.

Something that has struck me from flicking through my diaries, they live in the cold recesses of the tool cupboard and I can’t resist a brief flick as I rummage around for another rusty exhibit to embarrass with a candid photo or two, is the number of partners who, shortly after meeting me, have undergone a minor life-changing event. Not in a long-bearded, paint-daubed and squatting guru way, it’s not directly because of meeting me, it’s more that through no coincidence they have been promoted or opportunities have suddenly come within their grasp that didn’t appear to be there a few months previously. I can only think, without too much false modesty, that at some sub-conscious level I inspire people to strive, without even realising they are doing it, for that advancement or change in their careers as a convenient way to escape our relationship and more precisely, me. Linda threw herself into her new position, and became super-nurse, extra shifts became common and she became so serious, gone was the attractive, mid-twenties, blond, petite, good sense of humour; replaced by, ‘If it’s not directly related to serious injury or debilitating illness then I'm not going to talk about it‘. She was a driven woman, slowly driving me away.

Another problem, when I did see her, was her insistent eagerness to share her everyday experiences, in details I didn’t want to share. If I tried to change the subject from all the hues available on the colour-chart for weeping ulcers, she would accuse me of having no interest in what she did all day. It was very informative, but it became an endless litany of pain and frequently undignified death, perhaps it was a healthy thing for her to talk about these things to a sympathetic partner or maybe it was just the shock value she enjoyed. This blog is once again beginning to read like a statement I'm later going to rely on in court, but not every emotional entanglement can be a marathon, some are a quick sprint to the tape just leaving that bit of bent-double with hands on knees puffed assurance when it's over, “No, I’m fine, really, I’ll be okay in a minute.”

However, Linda never smacked patients; she was good. Far too good for me and she didn’t need me either, she needed another uniformed emergency person and they could, and probably did, swap increasingly horrific anecdotes and disintegrated-flesh coloured swatches until they fell into each others arms, dizzy with catheterized bed-bathed pressure-dressed passionately-practical overload. After a few more months I felt completely lurable and I was lured away by the self-fulfilling prophesy and abundant charms of a friend’s cousin who I met at his wedding, a wedding which Linda missed. While I was tending to pay less and less attention to Alan’s extravagant and well-attended nuptials and more and more to his cousin, Linda was tending to the sick and needy.

As I sat in a very pleasant and fascinating church on the designated groom’s side of the nave, admiring the Gothic quatrefoils above like so many stars in a beautifully jointed firmament, I was suddenly cast into voluptuous shadow and asked to ‘shove up a bit’ by a late-arriving girl in a floral dress. There really wasn’t room for another amply covered pelvis on the pew, but I could hardly say no, so looking at the face under the huge purple hat next to me, a late middle-aged face lined with a natural disapproval of being shoved up against by someone like me, I made a sort of inane facial questioning gesture. The sort of face you might pull when holding a melon and looking at a French market stall-holder to enquire the price without uttering a word, and just as the stall holder answers, “Melon”, the behatted and late middle-aged lady looked at me and then at the rows behind us and finally to the floral girl and said, “What?” The girl had by this time realised the ceremony was about to begin in earnest and was anxious to become less obviously standing directly in the path of the oncoming procession, she had turned her back towards us, sidled halfway into position and was possibly about to sit on me in desperation.

With equal desperation, the urgency of the fast-deteriorating situation dawned on me and I was compelled to be more direct than I would have liked, as I asked the unfavourable expression under the neighbouring brim quietly but distinctly, “Would. You. Mind. Moving along please, so this girl can sit down.” I gestured with an open supplicating hand towards the looming flowery fundament and the gorgeous face looking back to see where it was going to land. And it was at that precise moment, in a beautiful example of early Norman round-towered church architecture with a well preserved semi-circular three-windowed apse at the east end, and looking as though I was about to do something unspeakable to a young lady’s bottom poised less than a foot from my upturned splayed hand, that I noticed Louise.

The very first time that you notice someone never fades, the second after can just disappear whenever it likes and time can erase the following weeks and months but the first vision, in a heartbeat, is etched forever in your memory, and it’s not always sparks of radiance glinting through golden tresses on a palm-fringed beach, backlit by a fiery tropical sunset: sometimes it’s much better.

The late middle-aged lady huffed, either behind her thin clamped-pale antagonised lips or below her tweed-covered withered buttocks crabbing across polished oak, and sandwiched a small frowning boy breathlessly between herself and a swarthy lantern-jawed man who I distinctly remember as having the hairiest ear, the one I could see, that I’ve ever set eyes upon. Louise sat, and smiled gratefully just as the familiar trumpeting started the slow walk, sometimes it seems I can hear, not the fanfare, but the asthmatic panting of the bride’s mother straining to a slow drum-beat between the shafts of a tumbrel, from the back of which a man looks about, nonchalantly innocently grinning; but that aside it was all smiles and tears of pride as usual on the big day.

Not only a big day, it was a big hot day, a stifling summer febrility stole through the congregation making them flutter at their faces with winged lemon-yellow hymn lyrics and I could hear crickets sawing their only chord in a patch of unkempt graveyard just beyond the large arched doors, thrown open at the behest of the perspiring pastor. I was also conscious of only one side of my body, one side was pressed, against my will, against late middle-aged tweed: rasping, indifferent, atrophied, cloying Freesia-scented frigidity. The other side fused from ankle to shoulder with soft, gently rustling Louise from cotton sliding against more cotton somewhere. She was hot, in every sense, the sort of heat that comes off babies when you have to hold them for any length of time, but she was probably up around six or seven baby therms, and I think it was during those thirty minutes that, with only a few whispered words of introduction as we rose and fell for each of the overtly religious sing-songs, that I realised how wonderfully comfortable she was in every way, if a little warm.

For the rest of that day and night we: sat, stood, leaned, didn't dance, talked, grimaced, pointed, toasted, listened to the best man do his best with the only available innuendos, moved place-settings, nibbled, pushed things around plates, congratulated, commiserated, mildly questioned, strongly agreed, and surprisingly didn't once mention death or urinary tract infections, together. We casually arranged to meet the next day, it had to be late the next day, I had an unpleasant morning to get through first, I felt reprehensible and conspiratorial, but there wasn’t much of a choice.

I am surprised our relationship ever got off the ground, after the snaps, cutlery clattering, glass chinking, throat clearing, and half-way through the musical extravaganza that was Dave’s Disco, who must have offered a volume discount, we all gathered outside on that glorious late June late-evening to wave at the happy couple as they left their own party rather too early for an airport; it just looked a little desperate. I was standing beside my new acquaintance and couldn’t help notice that a tired wasp had alighted on her, precisely on the very rim of her low-cut dress just below her extensive cleavage. I don’t know why I noticed it but I did, and therefore couldn’t just pretend it wasn’t there - or for that matter the wasp - for all I knew she could be anaphylactically shockable, and Linda hadn’t covered allergies with me yet. If you play chess you will be familiar with the expression ‘j'adoube‘, which warns your opponent that you are going to adjust a piece, but you don’t want it to be counted as an official move. This is important in the game and at times, I suppose, in everyday life, if there’s a difference.

Perhaps I was thinking about Linda who despised all insects or maybe from some misplaced gallantry, I leant over and lightly wafted it away, without even thinking to first mutter the precautionary smattering of French. Louise looked at me, slightly startled and with the raised eyebrows and bemused smile of complete disbelief, I didn’t want to tell her I had forgotten that she wasn’t Linda already. I could have indignantly protested that I wasn’t in the habit of fanning strange women’s upper-areas for no good reason, but I just said, “Wasp”, and shrugged, this time in French.

“Oh, thanks, that could have been awkward if it crawled down there, we‘d never find it.” She giggled.

“Yes.” I agreed, always positive even when a negative was required, and started waving and wondering again. Though I was smiling and was flattered by being invited to join her hopeless search, I was thinking sadly how I was going to tell Linda the story of this happy and joyous wedding, and eventually about Louise; almost the recipient of, and most definitely metaphorically, the sting in the tail.
 
There isn’t an easy way of saying the words out loud and face to face with someone not expecting to hear them, luckily I have rarely been in the position where I’ve had to, generally I’ve been type-cast in the role of the dumpee with shock, disbelief, silence, curiosity, feigned indifference, feigned sadness, real sadness or theatrical bravado. I thought after every time that I’d gone out on a whimper, almost ennui for a lost cause, but I’d been through the on-off love affair a few times and it becomes tedious after a few performances of the same well-rehearsed lines. Honesty is the least someone deserves, unless it’s too hurtful then dishonesty is the least someone deserves, the hackneyed, “It’s not you, it’s me”, has been so overdone in every corner of our snivelling media it was never usable in real life, not that it could be true, it always has to be ‘you’ in some way. I broached the subject the next morning, a Sunday morning.
 
She didn’t say much, ”How bloody typical, you go to one poxy wedding without me and you find someone you miraculously suddenly like better, what a bloody amazing coincidence that is, you’ve known her for five minutes and she’s great is she? Have a nice little chat about cars or books did you? How is she so much better then? Well? Has she got bigger knockers, is that it? Actually do you know what, you make me sick, you’re just like bloody Neil, he’s a selfish uncaring bastard too. I've been thinking lately, this isn't going anywhere, but this has settled it hasn't it? Thanks for telling me.”

“Neil? What Neil? Who's Neil?” I asked, when finally what she'd said had trudged the long winding path littered with convenient benches on which to take a breather, to the scenic area of brain that deals with sudden realisations and questioning furrowed brows. I shouldn’t have I suppose, I had just forgone any right to ask but anything to assuage that feeling of being so evil has to be welcomed, that and naturally a chance to be affronted.

“Nobody. He’s nobody.Someone at work, you wouldn’t know him, and it wasn’t serious anyway. Anyway so what, look at you and what you‘ve just done.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“It was nothing, it’s over now anyway. It‘s nothing like you and this tart, don‘t try and blame me for what you‘ve done, it wasn‘t me who met him and decided that‘s it, sod you; at least I waited to find out it wasn‘t going to work out, not like you and this sodding miss sodding perfect.”
 
“Oh, right.” It sort of made sense in a way. I looked like I was finishing with her on a whim, which must have felt worse.

Other than possibly, “Bye then.”, and undoubtedly at some point, "Sorry", that was the last thing I said to her, as a compassionate valediction it left a lot to be desired. If only Neil, who despite obviously being a slightly more charming Adonis than me, had also been more caring then it would have been Linda who experienced that uncomfortably guilty but overwhelming sense of relief as I drove away.

Yellow legs and red faces.

“There’s a chance of seeing the areola tonight.”

“Karen?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes, it‘s in the atmosphere.”

“That will be great then.”

Chatting idly at lunch last Friday night with Karen I pondered again whether her malapropisms were really just accidental. Recently there’s been the giant hardon collider and tonight she asked Trevor if he was looking forward to seeing a beaver up close. He’s going to Canada to sleep in a tent; two weeks of living amongst bears and wolves protected only by that well known impenetrable barrier of 1mm thick nylon. Without making an undue fuss I think we should all say goodbye properly before he goes, maybe buy some cakes and spend some time reminiscing about the good times we‘ve shared in the office.

Here is another of my great-grandmother’s recently rediscovered illustrative cartoons. This one appeared in Woman’s Weekly in July 1937, directly below a knitting pattern for a ‘sports cardigan’, wherein there was an almost prescriptive requirement to ‘purl one right through the back loop‘. I have sometimes speculated on why people look askance at my sports cardigan, I thought it was okay, possibly even de rigueur, but I have never known a thing about clothes. Golf-Tony has been wearing startling canary yellow trousers this week, twice actually, I was quite surprised the first time but quietly sickened, revolted and disconcerted when they reappeared for an encore. Even I, who as I said knows nothing of couture or even what that means, knew instinctively that golf-Tony’s legs were wrong, badly wrong.

We had reached the fourteenth green with some jolting hesitancy, just three blokes trying vainly for some directional projectile accuracy, and a fourth making a statement with his flapping trouser flags. I sensed a distracted contemplative pessimism pervading us as we faced the last few holes, the skies had blackened which only served to highlight golf-Tony’s insensitivity and as the first drop of rain was positively identified three of us bolted for the clubhouse.

Golf-Tony is partially obese and incapable of moving very quickly, so it was with some feelings of almost remorse that I looked through the clubhouse window five minutes later to glimpse what seemed to be a flashing yellow distress beacon a hundred yards away and almost obscured by the grey driving rain. Golf-Tony’s legs moving as quickly as they could across the swell of the eighteenth rough; if I was a coastguard I would have gone out and helped him but I’m not, and it was, quite obviously, absolutely pissing down.