A Do-Gooding Liberal Goes To The Pub.

The first thing I heard was a woman’s loud voice: “ Oh, he’s gorgeous. What a lovely boy.” She went on and on in the same vein. “What a darling. Look at his beautiful eyes. Just look at them. Oh, you darling, you are a beauty, Here, let me cuddle you.” And more. “You are a sweetie, and so good. Isn’t he well-behaved”.

I was sitting, on my own, at a corner table in the Church Inn in Ludlow, right hand stabbing at scampi, chips and salad, left hand holding my iPhone book.  I couldn’t see who this miracle creature was, but obviously the cutest thing on two legs. Two legs? Surely not, nobody makes as much fuss of a child. Besides, there’s always a ‘coo-chi-coo in it when there’s a baby involved. This creature was not being patronised, this creature was admired as a paragon and petted.

Ah, petted. It had to be an animal, most probably a dog. The Church Inn allows dogs to come in. Children are allowed in too but  not quite as welcome. Finally, the woman stopped shouting and a couple came past my table, making for the exit. They had a large, rather stout and very hairy dog in tow.  He was indeed well-behaved and docile, his lead hanging fairly loose and all three of them relaxed. The waitress, for such she was, followed them for a few steps, stopping at a table opposite me. “He’s lovely,” she sighed and “isn’t he a big boy.”

She had my full attention now that I could see her. Fortyish, a bit buxom, like all the best barmaids, dressed in tight-fitting black clothes, black boots, with dark abundant hair pinned back with combs. A real pub landlady.

The table opposite me was occupied by a middle aged couple, having a sandwich lunch. They were clearly regulars, because the waitress appeared to know them.

“I prefer them to children”, she offered. “You wouldn’t believe the kids that come in here sometimes. Chucking food around, crying and shouting, running between the tables and having big enough tantrums to frighten the customers away. The other day there was a kid who scribbled all over the table with his crayons. Would you believe it?”

“I wouldn’t mind so much if they were regulars. No, they come in once and think they own the place. Think their kids can get away with murder. Tourists are the worst.” November is not tourist season, there was no danger that one of that particular breed of customer was within earshot. Ludlow depends very much on the tourist trade and it would never do to insult a tourist to his face.

“Give me dogs any day". She stopped for a minute to make sure she wasn’t offending the couple at the table. “Do you have children?” The couple shook their heads. “Right, you’re like me. I don’t have kids either, never wanted any. Dogs are less hassle any day.”

“Actually,” she continued, in full flow once again, “I blame the parents. Do they stop the little darlings from creating havoc? Do they, heck. Not likely. It’s all - here her voice attempted a posh accent - 'do stop it, darling; don’t do that'. But they don’t really stop them. Bloody liberal do-gooders. "

Eh? I must have missed something. Where and when did liberal do-gooders come into the picture?

“Bloody liberal do-gooders, that’s who I blame,” she continued. When I was naughty as a kid, I got a clip round the earhole and a smart smack on the back of my legs. Didn’t do me any harm. Nowadays, you’re not allowed to touch them.” The couple agreed with her and all three snorted in disgust.” No, give me dogs any day. No trouble, dogs.”

All this time I kept my head well down and my eyes fixed to the screen of my phone but certainly no longer reading. Would the waitress recognise me for who I am when she saw me? A bloody do-gooding liberal? Finally, she turned away from the table opposite, came over to me and reached for my now empty plate.

“Alright?” she asked in a mellow voice, and much reduced volume. “Everything alright Darling?” Weakly I nodded. “Yes thanks, lovely.”

Overheard, or Life, Glorious Life

“Hello, Good Morning Mrs. Williams, I’m Doctor Barnsley, how are you today?”

“Not too bad,”
Mrs. Williams is an elderly lady, small, with a cloud of wispy, snow-white hair framing her delicate face, and possessed of a very sweet smile and gentle demeanour. She leans back into her pillow and awaits Doctor Barnsley’s further utterances.

“I’m glad to hear that,”
he says and sits down on the edge of her hospital bed. He is a big chap, robustly healthy, the rugger type, as so many doctors seem to be. He is in shirt-sleeves, his stethoscope casually draped round his neck. He takes her wrist in his large hand, his thumb on her pulse. 

“I’ve come to talk to you about the test results. You remember the ultrasound and x-rays you had, Mrs. Williams?”
Barnsley is calm and professional. Mrs. Williams nods, she is poorly physically, but compos mentis.

“Do you remember I told you that we found that lump in your chest? It’s bigger than we hoped it would be.” 
Barnsley gives Mrs. Williams time to grasp what he says. She continues to look up at him trustingly, her sweet smile still in place. Again she nods, but doesn’t say anything. 

“There’s nothing we can do about the lump; it’s too big and quite inoperable. We believe that the usual treatments wouldn’t be much use to you; they’d be harsh and it is unlikely that you would gain anything.”
Barnsley’s voice is measured, slow, utterly dispassionate, yet not unsympathetic. He offers no personal emotion, but he repeats his sentence in slightly different words, to make sure that Mrs. Williams understands. Her smile grows serious but doesn’t disappear altogether. Mrs. Williams knows how to behave. Then she coughs, pressing her handkerchief to her lips. The cough is long drawn out; she finds it hard to get her breath.

“But that doesn’t mean that we can do nothing at all,”
Barnsley continues, his voice remaining even and relaxed.
“We can make you comfortable, free from pain.”
This is another sentence he repeats several times, using different words. 
“We can make sure that there is no pain and you will be comfortable at all times. You will have to have more care at home, of course. Who looks after you? How much help do you have?”
Mrs. Williams has children and there’s a husband. 
“You will have to have professional help too; we can arrange for that through Social Services.”

Mrs. Williams receives her death sentence as calmly as Doctor Barnsley pronounces it. I am no longer certain that she has fully understood that her days are not only numbered, as all of ours are, but that her numbers will run out in the near future and that there will be a period of suffering and pain to go through, no matter how helpful modern medicine is. Her smile fades. Her eyes become vacant, no longer focussing on the speaker.

Doctor Barnsley rises to leave, gently putting Mrs. Williams’ hand on the coverlet, patting it, absently. “I’ll get the nurses to ring for your family.”
 Mrs. Williams speaks for the first time.
“Thank you,” she says.

Later in the day, husband and son arrive. Doctor Barnsley also appears. He speaks quietly to the two men. All I can hear him say, repeatedly, is:
”She knows, she understands.”
Mrs. Williams herself is silent, a barely perceptible presence.  Neither husband nor son address her directly. Doctor Barnsley excuses himself and the men stay at the foot of the bed; now and then a word punctures the invisible fog of helplessness surrounding them. 

“Come on, Dad, let’s go and have a coffee,”
the son finally says. Dad agrees.
“Back in a bit, Mum,” 
he says, as they turn to leave.

Not much later Mrs. Williams softly snores. She has fallen asleep.

Calories Off Somebody Else’s Plate Don’t Count

It was too hot to cook,  so lunch at the pub it was.

Four late middle-aged ladies sat at the next table, all retired teachers to judge by their very lively conversation. Three of them were eating the speciality of the house, fish and chips, with a side order of mushy peas and a large dish of tartare mayonnaise; the fourth woman had a salad. As she was also the plumpest I wasn’t surprised when she explained that she was on the 5:2 diet. I’d only recently been told by somebody else that this is a relatively painless way of shedding a few pounds, so I was interested in what she had to say.  I looked over and saw her take a chip (French fries) off her friend’s plate.

“Go on, have another,” her friend said. “O no, I won’t, just the one will do”, the dieter said.

“It’s really quite easy to stick to this regime”, she continued, “I eat what I want for 5 days of the week and on two days I reduce my calorie intake to 500. I’m allowed 200 calories for my lunch today and tonight I’ll just have some chicken. I had a boiled egg and fruit for breakfast, so all in all, I shouldn’t be over my limit."

The four of them continued to eat and talk and I turned my attention back to my own food, also fish and chips. The portions were very generous, too much for me, and I started to wrap up my leftovers to take home for Millie. She loves a bit of fish and chips.

The ladies too had eaten what they needed and pushed their plates away, leaving some chips. The salad lady reached over and took another chip. “Nothing nicer than a well-cooked chip, is there,” she said, chewing. “Here you are,” her friend said, “ take them before they get too cold to eat.” One of the others pushed the half full dish of tartare mayonnaise over. “A bit of mayo to go with the chips?” All four giggled.

“O all right, then,” the dieter said, dipping chips into mayonnaise and popping them into her mouth. “Delicious !” she said, “they really do chips well here."

Snippets of Conversation

Surreal exchange before breakfast.

"Couldn’t get a wink of sleep for elephants.”

“Elephants? Trumpeting, you mean?"

“No, just huge elephants, selfish beasts, taking up every bit of room there was.”

“Indeed? What were you? The zookeeper?”

“ No, not really, I was meant to hold one of them.”

“A bit big for that, surely.”

“Absolutely. Nearly cracked my ribs. Broke my arm, anyway.”


Reaches over to open the fridge door. 

“Hm, sausages,” tongue slightly out, clamped between the teeth, voice coming through the nose, like Esther Rantzen’s dog.



Later, in the surgery, I’m waiting for a prescription to be filled. Meryl comes in, sees Kitty already there.

“Hello Kitty, brrr, isn’t it cold. How are you?”

“Not too bad, really.”

“Good, that’s the ticket.”

“Well, I’m not really all that good. Wouldn’t be here otherwise, would I?”  Kitty sniggers hopefully. 

Meryl gives in.

“Sorry to hear that."

“I’m in such a muck-sweat every night, it wakes me up. Like I just come out of the shower. No idea why. Doctor doesn’t know either.

“That’s bad, that is, Our mother had that too, towards the end.”

Kitty is speechless.







PS, added later:  The elephant in the kitchen is an early morning conversation in our house. Weird dreams no longer need an introduction when being recounted.

Overheard . . . .

Thanks for the honour, Hilary.

It’s much appreciated.

well, not so much overheard as said within my hearing.

The BBC had a news item about HM The Queen; apparently she has caught the tummy bug that many thousands of her subjects picked up this winter, only with her it’s gastroenteritis. She’s been admitted to a private hospital for observation. We wish her well, as we would any old lady of near 87 suffering this nasty and debilitating ailment.

The newscaster and reporter had a serious discussion about the event, during which the presenter in the studio asked:

“Will we hear any further news, about her condition and any progress she may be making?”

“No, we won’t”, said the reporter outside the King Edward VII. “The hospital never divulge any information about their patients and we most certainly will not be told about the Queen’s state of health. There may be an official statement from the Palace in due course.”

Beloved sat up in his chair and said “The Royal bowels are not for public consumption!”

How right you are, dear, how right you are.

Nightwatch

Dulle Griet  (Mad Meg)
 Brueghel, Pieter the Elder

Two-thirty am, on Ward AMU; as always, when I am here, I have tricked the medics: I have taken 2 mg of smuggled-in diazepam as well as the 10mg of temazepam prescribed for me. I have no idea how bad this combination of tranqilizer and sleeping pill is for me but it has allowed me some hours of uneasy, often interrupted, but nevertheless recognisable sleep, a state of being I would otherwise not achieve. The heart monitor above my bed is bleeping regularly, several short bleeps of sharp, even tone interspersed with a number of higher, more urgent, longer notes. These latter tell me that the rate which fluctuates between anything below one hundred beats per minute to up to one hundred and thirty beats has reached the upper rate. l30/pm is not good but still better than 180/pm, a heart rate I have endured on previous hospital stays. The day before I had gone for a deep tissue massage to Jilly-with-the-healing-hands. She went to work on my back with her usual enthusiasm, thus stimulating my adrenal glands into a frenzy of adrenaline production which caused an electrical malfunction. For 99.9% of people  there would be no ill-effects. Not me. I am awkward, or rather, my obstreperous cardiac system is. 

I lie quietly, listening to the monitor and the noises around me. I am wearing an eye mask, the sort of thing they give you on long-haul night flights, and have stuffed ear plugs into my ears. They never fit properly, only when I keep my fingers on them, pushing them further into the ear opening, do the noises in the room recede. The eye mask is a little uncomfortable but it does the trick of dulling the already dimmed lights to an acceptable level. The noise from my neighbour has woken me. “Go away”, she shouts, “I don’t want to talk to you. You hear me?” It sounds like a command, not a request. Her voice is guttural, riddled with the cancer destroying her lungs.

The self-medication has slowed my thoughts, I am too tired to be angry at the disturbance. Floating in semi-sleep on the lonely island of my hospital bed I am directing a vague prayer towards an unspecified omnipotent deity. “Please, back to normal, back to normal, back to normal”, as if  the rhythmic repetition of the phrase could regulate the wild hammering in my chest. I have experienced this malfunction many times in the last five years, but every time I am afraid that this time it might not stop as suddenly as it started, that it might never go back to normal.

My neighbour continues to fight old battles. “How did you get in here? I don’t want you, get away from me.” There is implacable hatred in the sound. There is also fear. “What do you want? Get out”, her voice rises in panic. “It’s mine, mine”. And over and over: "I don’t want to talk to you, go away, you hear me!” She is so angry that her words become an indistinguishable mishmash of gurgling phlegm, spat out in a fury of demented malice. I had seen the woman earlier in the evening when I passed by her bed. She was calm then, a very old, very ill, heavy-bodied relic, toothless mouth wide open, not long from death. Now, at night, dementia has resurrected her old enemy, somebody surely long-dead, but hated and feared still. The gurgling turns to a rattle, she is falling asleep again.

A great wave of pity overcomes me, I am swamped by a feeling of tearfulness, a mourning for what is, and a fear of what is to come. My heart aches for the old woman, whose remaining nights on this beautiful earth are filled with the poison of a festering sore, neither forgiven, nor forgotten, never relieved, never healed. In the dead of this hospital night I promise myself that whatever happens, whatever imagined or real ill is done to me or done by me, I will resolve it; I will not let the demons pursue me into the fog of my dissolution.

I drift back into an uneasy sleep.

In the morning the orderly brings my breakfast. I sit up, swing my legs over the edge of the bed and pull the table towards me. As I am doing this, I glance up at the monitor at the exact moment when, after 50 hours of non-stop pummelling, my heart rhythm returns to normal.

Overheard

An elderly couple in the supermarket, staring into the freezers holding ice creams, discussing what the grandchildren might enjoy as a treat. She says:

There is that kind of ice cream with water. It’s not really ice cream though. What is it called?

Blank look from him. She frowns.

Do you know what I mean?

No, sorry, I don’t. Water ice?

Something like that. Like sorbet, or maybe slurry?

Slurry? Hardly. Do you mean Granita?

That’s it, only more common. You eat it with a spoon, I think. Or maybe you suck it.

Slush puppy?

Yes, that’s it. Slush Puppy. The children of the lower orders eat it in the street.

The man looks at the woman to see if she is serious. She is.

Overheard

Two old ladies sitting over their pub lunch, a bottle of wine between them, the level well down.
They are discussing the funeral of a mutual friend of theirs.

"Nice turnout and plenty of good hymns. I enjoyed that. I like a nice funeral."

"Yes, me too. Molly had a good life, 92 and not a day’s illness.”

"She was never the same again after that time she went to visit her family in America and crashed her car on the way home from the airport.”

"That was only two years ago, game old girl, wasn’t she? Do you remember the time she got on the wrong plane? That was in America too.”

"Or the time we were supposed to meet her in Mellington and she drove all the way to Newtown, after she’d missed the turn-off?”

"Yes, she was a one, that Molly. But coming home from the airport, crashing her car on the A49, and then opening her front door and finding the place flooded, that was too much for her. She never really got over that, you know. I’d have died of shock there and then."

"Hadn’t she forgotten to switch the boiler off before she left?”

"Yes, she told me herself. Always cheerful and head like a sieve, our Molly."

The ladies lift their glasses in tribute to their friend and smile.

"Didn’t she have a marvellous death, though? Simply went to sleep and never woke up. Marvellous.
That’s the way I’d love to go. It was lucky her daughter came round to see how she was. She found her dead in bed, all peaceful. Marvellous."

The ladies sip and smile again.

After a while, one of them says, "yes, a marvellous death. That’s what I’d like for myself too. Mind you, I would hope they'd find me before I start to smell."

For some reason the ladies find this remark hilarious. Spluttering and flushing bright scarlet, their faces low over the table, foreheads almost touching, they collapse into uncontrollable giggles. All subsequent words are drowned in laughter.


I was tempted to ask if they do funeral orations.