Aches & Pains Read online

  There’s a kind of one-to-ten horror scale about these stories:

  1) The hospital that was so high-tech no one understood anything.

  2) The hospital that was falling down with old age.

  3) The woman who was asked her age in front of everyone by a young pup in a white coat.

  4) The nurse who behaved like a weasel because her romance was over.

  5) The man who left his false teeth beside the bed and they were tidied away permanently.

  6) The radiography department where they lose all the X-rays.

  7) The time it took an hour for someone hacking about to find a vein to draw blood.

  8) The hospital where they amputated the wrong leg.

  9) The person who went in with one thing and came out with something much, much worse.

  10) Something that was mis-diagnosed as trivial turned out to be fatal.

  All of this is total nonsense. And worse, it is inappropriate nonsense. If you were prepared to listen you would hear equally insane horror stories from people about banks, garages, universities, cafés, airports and supermarkets. But you don’t feel so vulnerable in these places. You’re inclined to believe the gloom merchants when they talk about the horrors connected with illness. Why should you? The hospital has worked fine until now, why should it fall apart the day that you come in?

  You will meet fine good people in hospital. Trust me. They’re well trained; they don’t flap in an emergency; they don’t faint when they see blood; they are mainly in this business because they do actually care about other people, and there is one sure thing about the nurses … they certainly are not in it for the money.

  It is, in fact, very reassuring to be among professionals who know what is serious and who realise what definitely is only our own imagination working overtime. They speak soothingly. If you tell them you’re frightened and anxious, they won’t tell you to pull yourself together and develop a stronger backbone.

  Think positive. In hospitals they make you better. That’s meant to be – and is – their job.

  That nurse is not a weasel. That nurse is probably a sort of angel. The nurse knows how bad it is not to feel well since a nurse’s whole working life is spent dealing with exactly such people. Most people fall in love with a nurse or at least want that nurse to come home with them after the hospital stay.

  If you go into hospital full of dire forebodings then you’ll surely find something that might live up to your gloomy expectations. Instead you should say very firmly on Day One that you have been told no kinder human beings exist on planet Earth than nurses, and no more worthy institutions were invented than hospitals.

  Try to believe it, because it’s really almost true, and also try to say it in normal, sane, non-babbling tones. You’ll wonder afterwards why you listened for two seconds to the horror and doom people.

  EIGHT TERRIFIC THINGS TO DO

  ABOUT GETTING OLD

  1) Tie your glasses around your neck and your hearing aid to your ear and your stick to your chair. These are all great gadgets that make life much easier. We should all have had them years ago. The only annoying thing about them is losing them or letting them fall. So don’t let that happen – tie them down.

  2) Say getting old is challenging – never apologise about it. If you sit clamped in your chair as if you were tied down and padlocked, that’s how people will see you. Instead keep reminding them that Paul Newman said, ‘Old age ain’t for sissies’. It’s cool to have Paul in your corner.

  3) Demand to be heard on the excellent grounds that you have been around longer than other people and more just might have rubbed off on you from sheer longevity.

  4) Tell outrageous, scurrilous and mainly imaginary stories about well-known people long dead and unable to deny it all.

  5) Be eccentric. You’re allowed now. Wear the cowboy hat and the feather boa that you’ve ached to wear for decades but were afraid people would think you looked silly in.

  6) Tell everyone you are ten years older than you are. If you say you are seventy-five when you are actually sixty-five people will unaccountably be overcome with admiration. Never for a moment pretend to be younger.

  7) Cultivate the friendship of very young people, your grandchildren and your friends’ grandchildren. Tell them how idiotic and confused their parents were at their age, and what frighteningly awful haircuts they had.

  8) Don’t say everything was better in the old days, because it will only make you sound like a boring old fusspot. And really and truly, everything wasn’t better, you know.

  FIVE WAYS TO RAISE YOUR

  ANXIETY LEVELS IN HOSPITAL

  1) Realise that the running of your home has totally collapsed to the point where your family have put it up for sale, refusing to be comforted; your cats and dogs are yowling to the moon, and the office is in complete chaos.

  2) Decide that even worse than this, there is the possibility that everyone and everything is getting on perfectly fine without you.

  3) If people don’t come to see you, send cards or enquire, accept and believe that they always hated you and this is just the proof you needed.

  4) If people do come to visit, accept it’s because they heard you are terminally ill, or are guilty at having had an affair with your spouse.

  5) If the hospital staff are young, shrewdly deduce that they are therefore raw and inexperienced, and if they are mature, that they are doddering and over the hill.

  HIDING BEING LAME

  I spent two years of my life hiding the fact I was lame. Why? Because I foolishly feared that people might think I was over the hill and not give me work any more. And because I didn’t want endless discussion about it and pity.

  So how did I hide it? Mainly by being in places much earlier than anyone else so that they didn’t see me limp in. If I was meeting people in a café, I would be well-installed before they arrived, and then let them leave ahead of me, pretending I had more work to do, or calls to make before I left, so they wouldn’t see me limping out.

  I used to look at each short journey to be made and work out how many litter bins there were along the street. They are truly great things to sit on, and you can always pretend you are studying a map or reading a paper.

  If I were invited to a function in a public place I’d telephone in advance and ask if I could have a barstool to sit on. If I were invited to a private house where people were expected to stand I would ask if they had a kitchen stool and perch myself on it in a nice handy area where it was possible to talk to everyone. I would ask people to my place rather than go to theirs.

  I learned, and then immediately demanded that all my friends learn, to play bridge, which was nice and sedentary and no one knew whether you were lame or not. If ever I was going to stay in a hotel, I would write and say it didn’t matter what kind of room it was as long as it was near the lift. In a theatre or a cinema I would ask for an aisle seat near the back row.

  If I hadn’t hidden it properly, and on a rare, insensitive occasion anybody asked me why I was limping, I gave some totally unlikely explanation like a skiing accident, a fall from a trapeze, or a sexual experiment with a chandelier that had somehow misfired. It amused nobody but myself really, but no one ever asked again.

  BE A FRIEND TO YOUR FEET

  A quarter of the 206 bones in your body are in your feet.

  HOW TO BE HILARIOUS

  ABOUT MAKING A WILL

  When I was twenty-one my father gave me £100 and asked me to make a will. Well, I don’t think I ever enjoyed anything as much in my whole life. I sat in my bedroom sucking a pencil and bequeathing away all day long.

  First I left my mother and father £40 each, which was an enormous amount of money then, and I wondered what they would do with it. My mother might have had a coach tour in Scotland. My father might have bought some nice bound books. I would leave my brother and two sisters and Agnes who lived with us £2 each, which would have bought them each a very nice treat and totally got them over the anno
yance of losing me from the earth. And I was going to leave £2 to the cats’ home to thank it for providing us with Smokey, the noble and admirable half-Persian cat who had stalked through our youth without giving the slightest sign of recognising any of us and taught us all whatever independent streak we have.

  But then there was a problem. There would only be £10 left. I wanted to leave £1 each to my friends and £1 to an enemy to make her feel remorseful that she hadn’t been much nicer to me. But I had twelve friends, so there wouldn’t be enough. And suppose, even more worryingly, that I had actually spent some of my inheritance so that there wouldn’t be enough on the day of reckoning? What would they do then? Interestingly it never crossed my mind that there might be any more than the £100.

  I told my father that it was actually a great responsibility having to dispose of £100 justly and honourably and he sighed and told me that indeed it was. I didn’t want to take away the enormous legacies that I was giving to my parents. I couldn’t bear them to think I had been a cheapskate. And I didn’t want to short-change the family or friends either.

  So eventually it came to me that if I were to give people percentages, things would work out fine. I wrote my will out in that form.

  I knew you had to get it witnessed by two people who were not going to benefit from it, and they didn’t have to know all the secrets you had in it, just to see you signing it was enough. I chose a couple whom I knew only slightly and brought my will along to them. I told them they wouldn’t be getting anything themselves in the way of a legacy, but since they worked in the local coffee house and saw that I was often pushed for the price of a cappuccino, I don’t think this came as any major disappointment to them.

  And so my first will was made. During the next year the enemy left the country, two friends sort of faded away and I had three new ones. I also had a notion of leaving a small sum to the zoo so they would name an owl after me. It was time to make a new will, and I attacked it with gusto.

  As I do every year. I have never been afraid of making wills – I love it. A very wise lawyer friend of mine once wrote that the only occasion when making a will might hasten your death is in the pages of an Agatha Christie novel.

  Making a will empowers you. You can feel all generous, warm, giving and organised without having to give up a single thing. I have left my gold chain to a Scottish friend who once admired it, and I feel terrifically kind and decent every time I put it on, without ever having to let it out of my grasp.

  You should never decide to make a will when you are on the way to the airport, about to take your first bungee jump, or in the middle of a paroxysm of coughing. You should make a will when you feel just fine. You should also tell all your friends to make wills, too. I’ve shamed a great many people into it by saying in an aggrieved tone that I have left them marvellous things and will be deeply affronted if it turns out that they have left me nothing. Stress that you only want a keepsake, not the deeds of their house. That should reassure them and force them into will-making mood.

  When it’s all written out in ordinary English you could go to a lawyer who will put in jargon for you. But you can just buy printed forms, and the home made versions are fine, too.

  Never start to brood darkly about the words ‘Last Will and Testament’. Think, this one is the last one until the next time.

  NOTES ABOUT WILLS

  Don’t say ‘If I die’. We all do sometime, as it happens. Say ‘When I die’ or ‘After my death’.

  Don’t say ‘I leave all my money’. That could mean the £10 in your wallet. Instead refer to it as your ‘estate’.

  Say where things are – ‘I leave all the Gene Pitney tapes, which are in a box under the stairs …’

  Say something schmaltzy and feel-good. I have left a decanter to someone with the sentence: ‘In memory of all the happy bottles of wine we shared together’.

  Finding your will is not meant to be a game of hide-and-seek. Leave it in the bank, or your desk, somewhere the beneficiaries won’t need radar or sniffer dogs to detect it.

  TO PREVENT HYSTERICS

  Caraway seeds, finely pounded with a small

  proportion of ginger and salt, spread upon bread

  and butter and eaten every day, especially early in

  the morning and at night before going to bed, is a

  good remedy against hysterics.

  (The Housewife’s Receipt Book, 1837)

  GADGETS FOR THE WISE

  A lot of the aids advertised in catalogues for the disabled or indeed the elderly, and available in stores, are extraordinarily useful for those who as yet have no official need for them. It’s a wise person who becomes familiar with such items ahead of the posse.

  – A safety rail for the shower. You might not need it to hang onto yet, but it’s very helpful when you’re washing your hair and are blind as a bat.

  – Those bookholder things they have for recipe books also work splendidly for your ordinary reading.

  – A piece of strong ribbon or a scarf tied to the car door handle, so that you can pull it shut without straining.

  – A one-hand tray that has a kind of basket handle is terrific for going out to the garden or just upstairs.

  – Long-handled shoehorns and elastic shoelaces make good sense at any age.

  – Velcro fastenings are a hell of a lot easier than buttons in the places that are hard to reach.

  – Raised flowerbeds. Have them in the garden now, not later. You can always lean on them with a drink in your hand and do a bit of absent-minded gardening.

  – A ‘goods upwards’ box or basket on the bottom step saves on trips upstairs, where it becomes a ‘goods downwards’ receptacle for things that want to descend.

  – A long-handled dustpan is a joyous thing. You’ll wonder why they ever made the other kind.

  – A pick-up stick is a delightful tool for anything from reaching a hard-to-get book from a high shelf to picking up a piece of newspaper that has blown away.

  WHEN CHILDREN ARE SICK

  I loved being sick when I was young because I got even more attention than usual. I was allowed to have the big radio in my room, plugged into the wall and standing on a chair. There was a siphon of red lemonade just for me. Nothing was too much trouble and there was huge concern and sympathy.

  And of course, I always knew that I would get better eventually, hopefully in time for a party and not in time for the maths exam. For children there is none of that awful ‘wondering what it is’ business about being ill. They don’t go through a mental checklist imagining every headache to be a brain tumour and every wheeze inoperable lung cancer, so in a way they are luckier than the rest of us. All they have to do is put up with the symptoms and wait for them to pass.

  But nothing is as stomach churning for parents as looking at a sick child; they are so vulnerable and so different to their normal noisy selves. Had I been a mother myself, I think I never would have survived a child’s illness. I’d definitely have needed oxygen just watching whooping cough, and I feel sure I’d have been the one that had to be admitted into Intensive Care if there were an accident of any kind.

  Which is why I so admire the way that all the parents I know do cope. They seem to think that the scratches and scrapes and bruises and to my mind near death experiences just go with the territory. Are parents much better and calmer these days? They were certainly more alarmist years ago. Every summer when we went on our seaside holiday there were huge warnings about how dangerous the coast was, and indeed it was true; somebody drowned every summer at that resort. Whenever the cry went up that there was a swimmer in difficulties, every mother and father looked around in blind panic for their own brood, and when they found their children sitting harmlessly making sand-castles a few feet away they often went up and beat the arms and legs off them out of sheer relief. Which seemed very unreasonable, to say the least.

  Today’s parents seem to me much less flustered. I know a mother who starts to wail whenever her son has
a cut knee. She makes such a fuss that eventually he stops crying himself to reassure her that everything is all right.

  I know a father who tells his children that a fall from a bicycle or a cut knee is not important in itself but it does involve a lowering of blood sugar. This is pronounced very seriously as in a medical diagnosis, and the solution is proposed that to raise it again all that is required is a square of chocolate. This isn’t offered as a distraction or a bribe to stop crying, but as a proven medical remedy. Together they wait to see if it has worked, and soon the hurt child will agree that the blood sugar is back to normal and life can go on.

  I was minding an eight-year-old who got up suddenly and unexpectedly from a game of Chinese checkers and went out and vomited. He was perfectly fine. I was the one who was certain he had meningitis or food poisoning and was practising how to tell his parents that he had died in my care. But of course he had been brought up by people who panicked much less than I did.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured me. ‘It’s just that the body doesn’t like something so it’s sending it back.’