It has been a busy week in The Holme Valley. After the high-water mark of Easter Sunday last week, and my introspective navel-gazing and stocktaking about what I really believe, this week, my final week in “Broadmoor” has been (with one notable exception) a case of “back to the grind”, to try and wring every last ounce of advantage out of me being here.
The "notable exception" was Easter Monday. We had been watching the weather forecast over the Bank Holiday weekend and we’d decided that if we were going to go to Walney Island in the camper, then Easter Monday would be our best bet. And so it proved. Debbie told me to be ready and waiting outside by 10AM, so I made a special effort to get out of bed at 7.30AM and get sorted. At 10.10 I pushed myself breathlessly out into the sunlit car park, and sat there in my wheelchair, surrounded by a carrier bag of art gear and my fleece, until 11AM, when she finally turned up. It transpired that Butch, next door’s unruly dog, had chased Kitty up a tree and Debbie had been delayed trying to a) chase off Butch and get him out of our garden and b) entice Kitty down out of the tree. Since neither animal seemed particularly anxious to do what she wanted, in the end she had reluctantly left them to it, but not before first encountering Butch’s owner and unburdening herself of a few pithy observations.
We wasted no more time, and she shoved me up the ramps and in to the camper, then I transferred onto the passenger seat, which rotates. This is how it’s going to be if we get away to Arran, in all probability, I thought. Deb had put the bed up in the back of the camper and it was squarely occupied by Zak, Freddie and Tig, none of whom allowed my entrance to disturb their slumbers. Soon we were bowling along the M62 in bright sunshine, heading for the M61 and thence the M6 and the Lakes. I found myself with very mixed feelings. I welled up with emotion, on the one hand, because I had seriously thought I might never see the Lakes, or Walney, again. On the other hand, happy as I was to be going back, I was equally conscious that it wasn’t me doing the driving, and once more all of the work was falling on Deb. Exactly the same, but different.
The dogs loved it. Zak ran in and out of the sea, Freddie barked his little head off and ran round and round, even Tiggy found a sprightliness – no doubt induced by the bracing ozone – that had hitherto been absent from her gait. On the way through, we had stopped off in Ulverston at Booth’s Supermarket, and purchased a variety of yummy things to eat, so I had a lunch of crusty bread with tzatziki and roast aubergine tapenade. Then I got my painting gear out and painted a very unremarkable watercolour of the beach and the sea and the headland and breakwater. But, foul as it was, it was an important landmark for me, the first time I had painted anything for almost a year. All too soon, it was time to start on the long road back, but before we took our leave, Deb drove the camper up and round onto the headland, facing out to sea, so we could watch the sun going down. There was hardly anyone about, the wind had dropped from earlier, there was just the shushing of the sea as the waves went in and out hypnotically. Deb knocked the top off a bottle of Bateman’s Victory Ale (6.0%) and handed it to me, and I basked equally in its nutty, hoppy flavours in my mouth and the feel of the warm sun through the windscreen on my face.
Tuesday was the day I suffered for it all, of course. I don’t know if I had unwittingly exposed myself to a draught (ooer, missus!) but my shoulder was aching like mad when I woke up, which didn’t bode well for physiotherapy. It couldn’t have been the beer. That was bottled, not draught. By mid-morning, and following a liberal application of Dog Oil, I was feeling a bit more like it, and the post arrived, bringing a "get well" card from Maisie’s friend Pippa, and her tortoise, Jub-Jub. It is the first time I have ever had a get well card from a tortoise. And it was sweet of Pippa to send it. It never ceases to amaze me that these wrinkly old beasts manage to sleep through the whole winter, seemingly live for hundreds of years, despite being totally gaga, and manage to wake up every spring and somehow find their way to the nearest radiator. Then there’s the tortoise!
Anyway, the time came for physio, and this was my cue to have another go in the parallel bars. My previous record had been 30 seconds. Could I beat it? Yes I could! 45 seconds later I flopped back into the wheelchair, thinking “next stop, one minute!” But that was it for the day. I had to wait until Wednesday to beat my sit-to-stand record, which I did with two separate “stands” of 60 seconds. We also experimented (the physios and I) with getting me further upright by taking the wheelchair away when I was standing and substituting a “perch stool” as they called it, so that when I sat back down, I was starting next time from a higher “perch”. I could, at this point, shoehorn in the joke about anyone who can’t afford to buy a parrot outright being able to get one on higher perches, but I won’t. Oh. I just did.
The progress I had made in just a few days from only being able to hold it for 7 seconds to being able to hang there for over a minute was very heartening to me. Lucy, my physio, did make a point which was very valid, though, which was that it would be difficult for me to replicate this particular exercise and carry on when I went home. True, I ruefully observed, while making a mental note to look up parallel bars on Ebay.
Thursday was the day when Granny was returning from her royal progress to Southampton to see the various offspring, so Debbie came up in the afternoon instead of the evening, to allow her time to go to the station later and meet her Mum’s train. We sat outside on the seat in the sun again, and discussed what we would have to do in the way of modifying the camper if indeed we were going to make the effort and try to get to Arran again this summer.
I asked her what she was having for tea. (One of my perennial worries while I am in here is that she doesn’t feed herself properly. She, in turn, maintains that I have a secret plan to fatten up all those around me, so that I don’t stand out so much.) She said,
“I don’t know, but I am going to give up buying crisps because I only end up eating them.”
I was still trying to work that one out, when a large bird flapped slowly overhead.
“Is that a heron, or is it just a bird?”
Deb had also brought some stuff I had ordered online. On Easter Monday my rosary beads had fallen out of the pocket of my fleece somewhere in the camper, and were now in that annoying state of being “mislaid”. I knew that they could only be in a couple of places in the camper, but these were equally inaccessible and might as well have been lost. I was slightly miffed at this, because they had seen me all through my time in hospital and all through this epic winter. So I ordered a replacement set from the Walsingham Pilgrim Shop, in this case with a medal of St Padre Pio. I’ve been neglecting old Padre Pio lately, in fact I have been neglecting praying generally. I must make more of an effort, especially as the “How To Pray The Rosary” booklet that came with St P P tells me I have been doing it wrong all these years!
I’d also ordered a replica medieval pilgrim badge of St James, to remind me that one of the outstanding things on my “bucket list” from hospital was still outstanding, namely to go to Santiago de Compostella. [I made two important lists while I was in hospital; one of all the things I intended to do when I got out, before I finally kick the bucket, and one of the hymns and readings for my funeral, in case plan A didn’t work out!]
Later on, after tea, Lucy from the Archers’ web site called in briefly to visit, en route to Manchester. I hadn’t seen her since the night of my “leaving party” in Calderdale Royal, and was asking her about her new job, new car, new life, more or less, in fact. As she is a leading light in the local cat rescue circuit, I also asked her if she’d scout around outside and have a brief look on her way out for a small black and white cat (the one that taunted Freddie the other week) which I’d seen hanging around outside, and which I thought might be a stray. Sadly, however, although Lucy made the effort, the cat failed to appear.
The powers that be at “Broadmoor” had decreed that there should be a Royal Wedding Quiz, which we all filled in after dinner, in my case, I suspect, more ironically than most. The quiz was based on predicting what would happen on the day itself, and the penultimate question was “will there be a flyover [sic] at Buckingham Palace?” My answer was “only if they can get planning permission.”
I had assumed that was more or less the end of Thursday, but Angie, the Therapy Assistant stuck her head round the door and asked if I fancied another go on the parallel bars. I said I did, but sadly I was unable to emulate my previous feats. I was feeling a bit tired and past it, and could only manage two stands of 25 seconds and one of 30.
Friday was yet another bright day, weather-wise, only cooler. It was impossible to avoid the Royal Wedding, of course, as not only was it on the big widescreen TV in the patients’ lounge, but several of the old ducks had it on their own TVs, with the volume up to pain threshold level, so the overall effect was one of surroundsound. There’s a few seconds lag between the analogue sets and the digital ones though, so when they were singing the hymns, you got a sort of FA Cup Final “Abide With Me” effect of some people being half a bar ahead.
I’ve posted on the Royal Wedding in my other blog, so it would be futile to repeat it all here, except to say I hope he avoids the mistakes his mother made and I hope he’s allowed the space to do so. The News of The World probably left him a good luck message on his voicemail, anyway.
Meanwhile, for me, Friday became increasingly dominated by a problem with my wheelchair, specifically the flatness of one of the tyres. I didn’t think it was a puncture, I thought it was just that the air had got knocked out of it over time, in the way that it does with any pneumatic tyre. Various solutions were proposed, but unfortunately, I happened to fall foul of someone who “knew about bikes” and appeared bearing a bike pump and adapter. Bless him, he was only trying to help, but in effect, since the adapter had a split in it, he only succeeded in letting the air out of the tyre instead of adding additional air in! To make matters worse, he did it to the tyre that wasn’t flat to start with, so I was well and truly buggered now, with one soft tyre and one completely flat.
The people from Oakmoor managed to find another old wheelchair in a cupboard somewhere, and I transferred into that. However, it also had a flat tyre, so my movement was restricted, to say the least. My attention was diverted briefly from my wheelchair woes by the visit of Peter, another member of the Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Club from Ward 10 in Calderdale, and his partner Margaret, and we spent a pleasant couple of hours sitting in the sun, drinking tea and setting the world to rights.
I woke up on Saturday depressed at the thought that I now had one borrowed wheelchair (old and clanky, one flat tyre) and one “owned” wheelchair (new and clanky, two flat tyres). It felt for a moment like I had had my legs cut off, then I got a grip and steeled myself for the unpleasantness ahead. I knew that the wheelchair services people had refused to come out to look at it until Wednesday, and I had no intention of sitting here until then, unable to move more than a few feet across the room without the tyre coming off. So I knew, predictably, with a heavy heart, that I would have to do what you now have to do to get any sort of attention from officialdom these days, basically get on the phone and act shouty barmy until you have made yourself such a pain in the arse that they agree to do what you want, just to get rid of you. If only there was some other way.
As it turned out, there was. It was all to do with being in a state of Grace. Grace, in this case, turned out to be one of the helpers who was on duty that Saturday. As soon as she saw the wreckage of my wheelchair she said “Do you want a hand with that?” Slightly wary of “helpful” people I said “Do you know how to fix it, then?” and it turned out she did, - as part of her training she had covered wheelchair repairs 101. To cut a long story short, between us, using an old kitchen knife as a tyre lever, we got the inner tube back in place, the tyre on the rim, and she then hefted the wheelchair up and carried it down to the car park, where she had a plug-in compressor and tyre inflator which worked off her car battery, and duly pumped it up. In half an hour, I was sitting back in “my” wheelchair again, with two fully inflated tyres.
You may think, of course, well, that’s what she was paid to do. It isn’t, actually. She was supposed to be making beds and doing coffees and cleaning bathrooms and completing her paperwork. She didn’t have to help me out. She didn’t have to carry my dead wheelchair all the way along the corridor, down in the lift, outside and round to the car park, and use her own petrol in running the car engine to drive the compressor. She didn’t have to do any of this stuff. But she did. And those who decry public sector workers like Grace should think on, and think twice, before dismissing them as lazy, uncaring and inefficient. As I have said before, they are, in my experience, none of those things.
So, there but for the Grace of God (or something) went I. I spent Saturday afternoon packing up some of my stuff, and Deb and her Mum called by at teatime and took it home. For it has come to pass, that my four weeks here is nearly up. In fact, technically, it is up on Monday, but Lucy the physio said that I could go any time after my last session on Saturday, if it helped. Next week, I will be back at home, with all that entails. I am sitting here in the sunlight streaming in through the big window of my room at Broadmoor, but tonight, by the time you read this, probably, I will be at home with the cat on my knee, and will sleep under my own rooftree. I don’t know, in all honesty, where we go from here. I will have the new standing hoist at some point during the week. I won’t have any parallel bars. I will have a meeting with the ramp people about what they are planning to do on Tuesday. I will have a meeting with Jo my physio on Thursday, and she might well say that the NHS has thrown everything it can at me, and that I am stuck in a wheelchair for ever and ever, amen. We’ll see about that, but if she does, it will be a bitter blow after all the progress I have made here.
All this frantic activity hasn’t left me much time for my duty as a self appointed religious commentator! Actually, I love that phrase, “religious commentator” – they always describe Clifford Longley as a "religious commentator" on "Thought for the Day" and it invariably makes me think of someone reading the Bible in the voice of Eddie Waring. (Well, er, here’s Goliath, he’s a big lad, but his mother loves him…) All I’ve had time to do is to give a brief glance over the appointed texts from the Lectionary, while trying to bear in mind that, when you speak to God, it’s prayer, when God speaks to you, it could be schizophrenia. So, here’s my brief roundup of what I have found in this week’s readings, which may or may not be any use to anyone else.
Acts 2:14a, 22–32 seems mainly to be concerned with prophesying what the “Last Days” will be like, but it does contain – once again – some of my favourite King James bits, which, to my shame, I hadn’t known the source of, until today.
And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:
Old men shall dream dreams. I will go along with that, speaking as an old man with many dreams, as yet unrealised. I only hope I have the time, and the faith to turn them into reality, not least of which being the dream of walking once again.
1 Peter 1:3–9 is more concerned with the fact that the Apostles – and anyone who followed Jesus – is going to have to rely heavily on their belief, their faith, now that the bodily Jesus has left them:
That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ: Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory:
The final text, John 20:19–31, is about Jesus appearing in person to the disciples, including Doubting Thomas, who refused to believe it until he had seen it with his own eyes:
The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the LORD. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.
If there is a common theme coming out to me from all this, some kind of “message” I guess that it’s not to lose faith. We had last weekend, with the great triumph of Easter, and for me, with the great triumph of almost standing up, but now we’re back to the grind, back to the daily routine, the life of small things, and what sustains us is the faith that things might get better, if I believe strongly enough. But, as Hemingway once said, "If you're looking for a message, try Western Union!"
The future has once more become unclear. That door I wrote about is still open, but it hasn’t opened any wider. Padre Pio believed strongly enough in the wounds of Christ to begin exhibiting signs of them on his own body: I am not saying I want to go that far. In fact, I must be careful of pinning together what little faith I have and the idea of walking again, because if the walking again doesn’t happen, for whatever, reason, it could take my weakling faith down with it. So, like Doubting Thomas, I am back to asking for a sign. But if I don’t get one, instead of refusing to believe, I need the strength to hang on, metaphorically, to the parallel bars of God. With the wind in the willows, and the birds in the sky, and a bright sun to warm me, wherever I lie.
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