I must not moan x 100

On Big Brother, it’s probably about Day 3,496…I don’t watch it. Nothing can top Paddy Doherty in my books. On my father’s blog, it’s Day 18 of the Indian Summer which infers that he lives in Calcutta and not the reality of somewhere south of Leicester. In the life of one with a plastered leg, it’s Day 3 and the highlight of being trapped is fast becoming Bargain Hunt. This comes after the early morning call to continue the saga, via telephone, of avoiding paying council tax for the duration of being ‘disabled’

Today, I learned that County Hall has demanded proof of a number of uninteresting circumstances, none of which can be elaborated upon until I reveal my ethnic origin, marital status and current income. No, I don’t currently have an income, hence the application. Having met these requisites, I told the pleasant lady on the phone that I hadn’t received the said demand for ‘proof’. She agreed. They haven’t sent a letter. Well, is it to be done by telepathy? Perhaps you could just send us some money on the off chance was the reply. On the off chance of what? That I’ve got some money? And that you might empty my wheelie bin more than once in a Preston Guild?

Good God: three days in and I sound more like my father than he does!

While I’m hopping my irritable way to the loo, I remember Ivy. I visited Ivy, in her tiny flat for five years. It began as a piece of research but when you start with elderly, lonely people there’s no easy escape. She taught me a lot about the social history of Poole and was entirely devoid of self-pity with regard to the deal life had handed her. When they phoned to say she’d died, aged 93, she’d spent interminable years in a wheelchair, trapped in a room without a view. The light filtering over the net curtains told her what sort of day it might be.

Ivy’s grandmother came to Poole as part of that strange, forgotten exchange with Newfoundland. Stories of Ivy’s childhood passed with the children of Augustus John were mentioned as an afterthought. Ivy’s enforced transition from chapel to the Salvation Army was an assumed normality. Her mother’s death, attributed to the local proliferation of pine trees, was regarded with sorrow but without blame.

With my feet up on the settee, I watch two large butterflies playing in the October sun. Sparrows cling to the bird feeder and my robin hops on the patio. The stupid pigeons try to make love on the shed roof and all the pretty, sparkly things send their coloured rays across the garden. My daughter and I sign up to be contestants on Bargain Hunt. Not that bad really is it.

In the dead of night

I awoke some time in the early hours to hear the woman on the radio saying it was twenty five past the hour. That’s the trouble with the World Service: they never say which hour because everyone’s on a different time clock. Even when they do say what the hour might be, it’s always GMT so, even if you’re in the same country as Greenwich it’s still the wrong time. Radio 4 finishes at 1am and the World Service starts then; except that, according to the World Service, it’s still only midnight GMT. No wonder the nights are so long for us insomniacs.


There was enough light coming through the window to inform me that it wasn’t twenty past three. On the other hand, the shipping forecast wasn’t on the radio so I knew it couldn’t be twenty past five. Ergo…must be twenty past four. Unless you’re on GMT in which case it would’ve been twenty past three all along. How would a person ever get their bearings without Radio 4 and the World Service? They even have the decency to play the national anthem at a time when most folk are prostrate and can’t, therefore, stand up. That would be any time for someone with three tons of plaster on their leg.

It isn’t the plaster that’s contributing to my insomnia; I’ve had years of practice and made quite an art form of the business. The night before the plaster and I became conjoined for instance, I woke to the sounds of scratching and scurrying outside which, for some reason, I decided must be graffiti artists. I crept silently out of the front door hoping to surprise them but it was next door’s skunk doing stuff in its Wendy House in their front garden. I hadn’t heard it for some time and it transpires that he’d escaped for two months, only to be discovered in a neighbour’s garage. That must have been a pleasant treat for the neighbour.

The skunk had done well for itself and had become extremely overweight, somewhat akin to a smelly badger I imagine. I presume it’s on a diet now and spends its nights frantically and noisily searching for spare food or tunnelling its way back to the garage. What’s it doing here anyway screeched my friend. Why isn’t it in the Appalachians skunking around? It’s like the rat we had said daughter number one. But that’s another story which has a happy ending thanks to Gary, her neighbour’s cat.

Back to the bedside radio. You can learn a lot in the dead of night although I prefer to have it turned down sufficiently that I can only hear a drone; otherwise, it gets interesting and I have to stay awake to listen to it. Sundays aren’t so good though. I quite like Bells on Sunday – guess which church we’re at this week – but the rest of it is too discursive and moralistic. Ed Sturton would put anyone in a coma. I love the Shipping Forecast; when we get round to Selsey Bill to Lyme Regis I know I can doze off safe in the knowledge that worse things happen at sea than bags under the eyes.

Hardly a leg to stand on

I thought I’d go to A & E around 4.30 on Saturday afternoon; beat the evening rush of drunks and domestics. Of course, it was carnage: blood, sweat and tears everywhere. Talk about night of the living dead. Mostly men in sports kit and mainly head/eye injuries from what I could make out. Apart from the age range, it appeared as though they might have all been participating in the same event. Actually, the two lads from a posh private school in Oxford, dressed in wasp colours, had been at the same match and had gone for the same ball …one had the lump in his forehead, the other the indentation in his. They were conversing with a boy from the home team whose mother told me she watched every game, not because she likes rugby but so she could be on hand to take her son to hospital. She said he’d been there so often that she was surprised not to have been arrested for child abuse. I suggested she might well have been had it not been for the fact he’d got Canford embroidered on his socks.

Old Bill was in there too causing mayhem in his motorised car. ( Not THE old Bill ) He didn’t look much different from his usual environment in the smoking area outside the bingo although I did note a small plaster on his head. No, all in all, I think I was the healthiest looking specimen in the place. Non-affiliated shorts, tee-shirt and flip-flops and hardly resembling the walking wounded; certainly the best-read patient…Far From the Madding Crowd (though not in practice) versus the Sun and Closer. What do you mean – snob?

When I finally went through to the treatment room, they said it was difficult to reconcile my x-rays with the reality; surprised I was able to carry all that weight. Pardon? If it hadn’t been for the fact that everyone else had come as entrants in a Cyclops look-alike competition, we might well have assumed they’d got the x-rays muddled up. Sadly, they were mine and that was my broken foot. I sent a message to the man-child who was waiting outside with the hangover from hell. The wording of the text was akin to one he might have sent me the night before i.e. I’m getting plastered!

So now he’s playing nurse and already getting stroppy. He asked me to make a list of what was needed for the week. Easy: Radio Times, 200 fags and top-up my phone please. He was erring more on the food side it seems. Oh well, in that case, some red wine?