It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, though not necessarily in the way I might have wanted. Still no sign of any word from the Community Physio Team, into whose care I have been handed, apparently, and meanwhile I sit here losing all the advantage I gained in Oakmoor. I am not normally given to criticise the NHS. As I have said before, when it’s good, it’s very very good, but it does have odd moments where it behaves like your old senile Uncle who forgets your birthday, or when he does remember, sends you an out of date Woolworths voucher for a Kylie Minogue cassette tape, addressed wrongly by name to your elder sibling, and enclosing the receipt as well, by mistake. This has been one such week.
I know there’s always someone worse off than yourself, and I should try and remember that, but I was left with a distinct impression that (with certain glowing exceptions who have never given up on me, and who know who they are) the rest of the NHS was playing pass-the-parcel. I did, however, have a call from the Accessible Homes team about the ramp. They are posting me the drawing for the Alternative #2 solution, a ramp to the side door of number 111. “There is corn in Egypt yet”, though it could have been speeded up if Pharaoh had possessed a scanner and an email account. Still, I will listen for the postman with a quickening heartbeat.
The weather seems to have broken itself as well. Cooler, and cloudy, with the unaccustomed sound of rain falling on the conservatory roof like a million ball-bearings being dropped onto a sheet of steel. So on Monday I reluctantly reversed my sartorial progress towards fewer clothes for Summer, and added a t-shirt to what mountaineers call my “base layer”. I didn’t look at it particularly, just picked the first one off the clean pile, it was only when I was pulling it over my head that I realised it was a Jack Wolfskin one with a pair of boots on the front and the legend “I’d rather be walking” emblazoned across the back. Amen to that, brother, amen to that.
Because it is nominally summer, and especially in view of the fact that it was so hot in April, we have let the coal stock run down to half a bag, which means that when we have lit the stove, we’ve been burning mainly fallen logs and branches that Debbie has gathered in and around the garden and out and about on her walks with Tig. We’ve also been using one of those little halogen heaters, just for the convenience of being able to set it up first thing in a morning and bang on all four bars and get the place warmed up. For some reason, Tig really likes the halogen heater, and makes a bee-line for it every time we turn it on. One day during the week, her head was so close to it, I could have sworn I smelt singeing dog-fur, but she seemed unperturbed. I think maybe there is something about the focused nature of the heat it gives off that seems to bring warmth, cheer and comfort to her old rickety bones.
Kitty has taken to clambering over everything I am doing and jumping up to join me in the wheelchair again, as a consequence of the colder weather. I am not fooled by this cupboard-love, as my Granny used to call it. I know that if there was an alternative heat-source, and she could open the fridge herself and work the tin opener, I wouldn’t see her arse for dust. That, I am afraid, is cats for you. Because we inherited her from Colin, (RIP) we don’t even have a receipt to threaten her with. When I got the late, great, Sylvester from the Cat’s Protection League, you had to give a donation in return, to prove you were serious about cats, and they gave you a receipt. I kept it in my wallet (in fact, I think I have still got it somewhere) and whenever he did anything particularly bad, such as yikking up a furball onto some artwork or something, I would solemnly produce the receipt and flourish it at him, telling him to remember he could always go back.
For some reason, this week, I have seen quite a lot of Granny, too. Probably because we’ve been dogsitting Freddie and Zak, and I also helped her print out some colour photos of little Adam and various other family members, to send to Nicole, her French pen friend. What Nicole made of them, I know not. (A hat or a brooch for Papa, probably.) Granny has the habit (in fact all Debbie’s family do) of starting a conversation in the middle, or resuming a conversation you were last having two weeks ago, as if the intervening two weeks had not happened, and you were still carrying on from where you left off.
“I’ll tell you someone else who is in a wheelchair. Richard Attenborough!”
Me: “Really? That must make chasing lemurs rather inconvenient!”
Obviously it’s not just the NHS that gets the wrong sibling.
Other than these high spots of humour (yes, I know, the long winter evenings must just fly by, but you really had to be there) I have spent a dreary week doing accounts, and trying to work out exactly at what point on the graph everything will go critical and melt down, and we will have to sell Colin’s half of the house. I was very amused to see someone on the Mustardland Board use the phrase “welfare junkies” to describe people on benefits. I would really love for some of these mad colonels in Gloucestershire and appallingly dreadful middle England tricoteuse women who think that the whole country is fraudulently and effortlessly claiming money that it’s not entitled to, to have a go at crowbarring ESA out of the DWP. Currently, they owe me £252 which they are withholding payment of for no good reason that I can see, and that sum is increasing by £9.35 a day. Still, it all helps the government cash flow, I suppose, and if they can delay paying this “welfare junkie” for long enough, well, he’ll be out on the street, and someone else’s problem!
But, there is always someone worse off than yourself, and they wrote to me this week, in the form of a charity appeal from the one-legged Cambodian orphans, enclosing a tiny little miniature crutch, which they had personally whittled from bamboo, just for me. I realise that in these hard times, charities are having to resort to ever more desperate measures to attract donations, but at the time I received it, I thought the miniature bamboo crutch was probably a step too far. If it’s a joke, then Big G has temporarily lost touch with his audience, though as usual, I can’t fault his timing. I briefly considered writing back to the one-legged Cambodian orphans, asking them if they had any spare cash, and debating with them whether one functioning leg was better than two useless ones. I guess that if they want to get out of their own house, they can just hop through the door, unlike me. Eventually, though, reason prevailed, the red mist cleared, and I added it to the growing pile of charity appeals to be reconsidered one
day, if we ever have any real spare change again, if ever.
Then the next afternoon, a bloke cold-called me, when I was in the middle of reconciling the bank statement, to offer me a free gym membership. “Oh, boy, have you got the wrong man!” was my first reaction, but he was unfazed and said that the gym was wheelchair accessible. In the end, more in recognition of his refusal to give up than anything else (maybe I recognized a kindred spirit) I grudgingly agreed to have a look at their web site. Except it turns out, they didn’t have one, a crucial omission in an era when even the Look North weather man has his own Twitter feed! So we compromised, and I said I would ask my wife to have a look at his gym, next time she was driving past, to see if it would be suitable for me. So we parted friends, and he got off lightly, considering that in one of my (many) phone calls with Virgin Media this week I told them that if they didn’t make my mobile phone work properly, I would throw it in the garden pond right after this call, and there will be a new phone company on Monday.
Another key person in my life who has been conspicuous by their absence this week has been the plumber, so we are still having to turn the water off overnight to prevent the bowl, placed strategically under the sink to catch the drips, from overflowing. I don’t know what I have done to upset the plumber. Actually, I do – it’s called “not having enough money”. Whatever, he’s been busy elsewhere, and so when I came through this morning and went to fill the kettle for that first, life-giving, corpse-reviving, plasma-enhancing cup of tea, there was no water, and I was forced to recycle the water from last night’s hot water bottle. Therefore, the tea had rather a rubbery tang to it (reminding me of the joke about the man in the Chinese Restaurant who said “Waiter, this chicken is rubbery!” and the waiter replied “Ah, thank you, sir!”) Well, having offended the Cambodians, I thought I would go for the set and match. If the Chinese can’t take a joke, then they should stop attracting attention to themselves by arresting dissident sculptors, and get the hell out of Tibet.
And so we somehow got to Saturday, and the Cup Final. Being neither a particular fan of Manchester City or of Stoke, I didn’t really have a horse in this race, though my natural inclination is always toward the underdog. But sadly, big money prevailed, and Manchester City bought the trophy this year. After I had been looking forward to it, it seemed a rather lacklustre occasion, actually. Even Abide With Me, which is normally a massive flood-tide of emotion for me, seemed to pass me by.
Normally, it makes me think of all those people following their team, every week, rain or shine, win or lose, for richer, for poorer, standing in the grey Northern rain on the terraces, like me and John Taylor used to do, to watch Hull City, taking the place of people who had stood on those same terraces in previous generations, wearing flat caps and raincoats, and smoking woodbines, back in the days when Raich Carter was our very own Wizard of Dribble, and who were still all around us, in ghostly form, soundlessly cheering on the likes of Ken Wagstaffe and Chris Chilton from another dimension. A flowing tide of flat caps, bobbing along towards the ground on match days, disgorged by trams and trolley-buses. Rattles, scarves, and bobble-hats, and a cup of Bovril at half-time. Goalposts for jumpers. That’s what the FA Cup should mean, but like a lot of things in my life these days, it’s not what it used to be. Especially in the year since my last birthday.
Birthdays have been on my mind this week, because this Sunday marks Debbie’s. These days, we can only afford token presents, so she got a T-shirt. And if you think she was hard done by, it cost over three times as much as the tub of Mason’s Dog Oil that I got for my birthday. Anyway, in case she didn’t like it, I kept the receipt. Poor Deb, another year older, and she’s stuck with me. She didn’t sign up for this. In fact, when I think of the crap she has had to wade through in the last year, since all this descended on us, combined with her new career (which involves staying up til 4AM to prepare lessons teaching the land that education forgot – a.k.a. Dewsbury – about subject/verb agreement) and minor diversions such as crashing the car, to end up, ironically, with a hubby on wheels, I bet she wishes she had kept the receipt. I told her, of course, that if the Muscular Dystrophy did turn out to be the sort that reduced me to the physical and mental capacity of a “kneaded clod”, that she was free to bail out at any time. And yet she has stuck with me, as well as being stuck with me. Through thin and thin, for poorer and poorer. But there’s no sense at all in two people’s lives being ruined when she is still young enough and fit enough to find someone else to take her kayaking and climb mountains with. Maybe her birthday would be a good opportunity to tell her again.
I haven’t actually consulted the Lectionary, or the Book of Common Prayer this week. Deliberately, this time. I am trying not to look for non-existent messages from God, twisting the words of what I read to seek self-invented reassurances that I will ever walk again. Because if I carry on doing that, and I never do walk again, then I will feel that God has let me down, betrayed me, that St Jude and St Padre Pio and all the other entities I prayed to in my desperation will all have turned their backs. Also [and this is the point I reached with the Epilogues last time, though for different reasons] it’s hypocritical of me to try and interpret something else for people when I don’t necessarily believe it, or even understand it, myself.
It’s probably more honest to say that if Big G was leaving messages for me this week, it was in the letter from the Cambodian orphans and the call from the guy at the gym. Maybe there is always someone worse off than me, at least I haven’t been reduced to whittling bamboo crutches to beg for financial help yet (though if the Department of Work and Pensions are reading this, thanks to your lack of effort and support, I soon will be) and I can still get food from the shop, and sometimes (plumber permitting) clean water from the tap.
And maybe I should join the gym, if it really is free (though my experience of life is that usually, when something sounds too good to be true, it is) after all, it’s the nearest thing to physio that’s going to come my way.
Anyway, I am giving the Bible-bashing a rest for a week, to see what happens. I want to come back to it and read up around Whitsun, so I haven’t given up on it altogether, yet, just temporarily suspended my frantic search for hidden Cabalistic clues about Muscular Dystrophy concealed in muscular Christianity.
"God helps those who help themselves", is what the Victorians used to say, in between covering up the legs of the piano, so as not to inflame the servants and the lower orders. If it is the will of Big G, though God knows why, that I am now stuck in this wheelchair, and destined to be one of the ironsides forever, then maybe I should follow Cromwell’s dictum, and "trust in God, but keep my powder dry."
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