52. Discomfited?

Last Tuesday, I had to go to Hemel Hempstead to deliver a package.  I saw it was becoming unwrapped when I arrived and so I went into a newsagent to get some glue.  

As I entered, a woman was coming out. She turned to the shopkeeper and said, “Look after Mona for a couple of minutes, will you?  I’ve got to pop next door.”

She went out leaving the three of us in the shop - the shopkeeper, a fat little girl who was about eight years old and me. The lump of a girl stood staring at me, all the while stuffing her mouth with sweets. 

The shopkeeper went off to search for the glue I had asked for.  The girl continued to stare and stuff even more and more chocolate into her mouth.

“Hello,” I said. “Why aren’t you at school?”

She said nothing but put another sweet into her fat little face.  Then she wandered off about fifteen feet away to look at the display of comics.

The shopkeeper returned and handed me the glue.  “She’s been to the dentist,” he told me.

“Hmph,” I grumped.  “If she ate less chocolate she’d have better teeth and she wouldn’t be so fat.”

Her mother returned from next door.  “Come on Mona.  Let’s go.  Say goodbye to Dad.”

I have not often been embarrassed.  I’m probably too lacking in self-awareness to be embarrassed and also, when you’ve been in hospital for nearly four months and been subjected to virtually every indignity that it is possible to experience, very little else is really embarrassing.  

That’s why, to Caroline’s embarrassment, I sat in Miami airport for two hours after I had finally been discharged from hospital, waiting to catch the flight home to Cayman, wearing only my pyjamas.  Nobody said anything.  Maybe no one noticed.

There are two other instances, however, that I still remember clearly when I was embarrassed.  One happened fairly recently and the other happened about twenty-five years ago.

I had my liver transplant in October 2008.  I was very ill for about eighteen months and confined to bed for most of that time.  During that period of inactivity, having to eat only hospital food, I lost a lot of weight.  I dropped from 183 lbs (13 stone 1 lb) to 132 lbs (9 stone 6 lbs) in a year.  What do you think of that Weight Watchers?  It’s not a weight loss strategy that I recommend though.

Most of the weight I lost was muscle, due to the liver disease and atrophy.  Occasionally, I had been referred to as a “fatso” in the past but no more.  My legs and arms were stick thin and my bum had vanished.  I was not a pretty sight - but then I never was.  My legs were so weak and my arthritis so bad that they were not strong enough to support even my reduced weight.  My recuperation was slow and painful.

In September 2009, eleven months after the transplant and five months after a hip replacement, I had an experience that was probably my most embarrassing moment ever.

I would go to George Town hospital every fortnight for blood tests and the room where the blood was taken had two chairs so that patients could have blood taken from them, two at a time.  Just as I was having a piece of plaster put on my small puncture wound, a man aged about thirty, sitting in a wheelchair, was wheeled in by a lady whom I assume was his wife.

Three months earlier I had gone everywhere by wheelchair.  First, I had to be pushed and then, as my arms became stronger, I could wheel myself.  Then I progressed to a walking (Zimmer) frame and after that I hobbled around using a stick.

As I passed the man in the wheelchair I gave him my friendliest smile and said,

“You could be like this in two or three months time.” He smiled and shook his head.

“Oh, come on,” I said, “be positive.”

“That’s difficult,” said his wife and then she bent down to lift the sheet covering his lap to reveal that he was a double amputee.

“Oh,” I said.

One Sunday in July, about 25 years ago, Finchley Cricket Club held an intra club game.  We used to hold these games about once a season and they were always played very competitively.  No one wanted to fail against his clubmates. Usually the game would be something like Married versus Singles or Under 35s v Over 35s.

I was sometimes described dismissively, as a ‘leg side’ player.  That’s only one step up from being called a slogger.  Totally leg side players lack the finesse and skill to place the ball accurately on the off side and in the world of batsmanship they are second-class citizens.

Anybody seeing the field set for the first ball I received that day would have been in no doubt of the reason for that soubriquet.  There were eight fielders on the leg side and just one on the off side.

If you have no idea of the fielding positions in cricket, think about is as a clock face with me, the batsman, just below the centre.  The deep fielders were on the boundary at 3 minutes to the hour, 9 minutes to the hour, 14 minutes to the hour and 20 minutes to the hour while the four near to me on the leg side were in the gaps between the deep fielders. The solitary offside, slip fielder was behind me at 25 minutes past the hour.

There was a huge arc of 170° on the off side with absolutely no fielders. 

I glanced around and grinned. It was clear that they were taking the piss and the best way to deal with that was to bat properly and not rise to the provocation.

I looked at the fielders and saw eight of them chortling away on the leg side.  I wished a ‘good afternoon’ to the wicket keeper and to the slip fielder.

The first ball was slower through the air than I was expecting and it was a full length and on off stump.  Whatever field had been set and whatever the match being played, that ball had to be driven into the off side.  The fact that there was something like 7500 square yards of empty space on the off side removed all risk and any doubts that I might have had.  

I decided not to be greedy.  I would just push the ball into the vast acres of untenanted steppes and jog an easy two runs.

For the first, only and probably for the last time in his life, Mike Milton got one to turn. It flicked the edge of my bat and went waist high to Kus Bahradia, the slip fielder, who caught it nonchalantly and tossed it back to Mike.

Although I was embarrassed, there were about 100 other people who thought that it was one of the funniest things they had ever seen. 

Even I thought it was fairly funny.