74. Humps

In 2004 Lucy, my younger daughter, got married.  I, of course, had to make the “Father of the Bride” speech.  I haven’t been to many weddings and so I wasn’t very sure what was expected of me.  I knew that I was supposed to say nice things about the bride and the groom and that was easy enough but what else should I say?

Caroline suggested that I tried to say something funny.  I have a thing about speed bumps. What a misnomer. If anything, they slow you down!  I thought of a little joke I could make about them but the question was, at whose expense?  I decided that I shouldn’t say anything remotely smutty in connection with Lucy or David the groom but that Lucy’s godmother and her husband (let’s call them Janet and John – some of you will know who they really are) were a fair and easy target.

The moment came and as I concluded my short and probably dull discourse, both Janet and John sat there, half listening but revelling in the comfort and glow that comes when you have finished all the champagne that someone else has paid for and were now trying assiduously to test the capacity of the wine cellar, again at my expense.

“At that table over there,” I said, pointing airily in the general direction of their table, “hidden behind those many, many empty wine bottles, is Janet, Lucy’s godmother and her husband John.

“They had an interesting visit to Longleat a few years ago,” I told the 80 or so guests.

“They arrived at the gatehouse at the end of the long drive at about half past ten in the morning but they didn’t make it to the actual entrance of the Safari and Adventure Park until two o’clock in the afternoon.”

“The problem,” I continued, wondering whether the several old ladies from Middlesbrough who made up a large part of my audience would get the joke and would not be too shocked if they did, “was that there was a sign at the start of the drive saying ‘Hump Every 50 Yards’ and always ready for a challenge, that’s exactly what they did.”

A few people were kind enough to laugh a little but not Janet.  I was watching her as I delivered the punch line and there wasn’t even the flicker of a smile across her face.

Nothing was ever said about the matter – until last night.

Yesterday was my birthday and John, Janet, Caroline and I went out to celebrate it in a rather nice restaurant.  At about 10:30 and having consumed the best part of two bottles of wine (which he insisted on paying for), John leant across the table towards me.

“Can I ask you a question?” he slurred.

“Of course,” I told him.

“Do you remember, at Lucy’s wedding, telling everyone about Janet and me at Longleat?

I nodded.

“Who told you about that?” he demanded.  “It wasn’t me was it?  Janet thinks I told you once when I’d been drinking.”

For the last seven years, ever since Lucy's wedding, they have been accusing each other of disloyalty and gross indiscretion. 

“How did he know?  You must have told him,” is what they have been saying to each other and all the while both of them have been inwardly worried that it was they who had blabbed but were so drunk when they did that they couldn’t remember doing it.

They were both very relieved when I told them that I could have made any number of couples the butt of the joke and it was just chance that made me use them.

Naturally, Caroline and I were very keen to find out what actually happened and we questioned them intensively. 

It seems that there is a secluded wooded area adjacent to the Longleat Drive that will forever have a special place in Janet’s and John’s hearts and memories.

54. Will you still be sending me a Valentine .... ?

I finished last Saturday’s post by writing that unless something interesting happened at Sandown Park later that day, I would be putting up the final posting today.  Nothing interesting happened at the race meeting (not to us anyway) because we didn’t go.  Caroline woke up that morning unable to speak and with yellow blisters on her tonsils.

This isn’t the final posting, however, as I think that I’d better tell you about my birthday that happened last Tuesday.  I became 64.  Wednesday, October 6^th 2010 was also my birthday.

Like the Queen, who has her official and her natural birthday, I also have two birthdays – one on February 8^th, the day I was born and the other on October 6^th.   It was on October 6^th 2008 that I received my new liver.

I was lying in bed on Tuesday night after an enjoyable but exhausting day when Caroline asked,

           

“How old were you when, “When I’m 64”, came out?“

(By the way, that title is the stupidest one the Beatles ever came up with.  I bet Paul McCartney who is 68, regrets it now.  64 isn’t old!  It’s a song about a young man who has fallen in love and wonders what the future has in store.  Apparently McCartney wrote it when he was 16 and at that age 64 must have seemed a long way off then but even so, why didn’t he write, “When I’m ninety-four?”  Even in 1967 when it first came out I was irritated because my grandmother was 64 at the time and like me now, totally alert and independent.  Yes I am!)

“Nineteen or twenty, I think,” I answered.

“When you were twenty,” Caroline went on, “did you think then that when you became sixty-four you would be laying in bed with a beautiful, sexy woman?”

“Well,” I said, “I probably hoped I would be but even at nineteen I realised that you don’t always get what you hope for in life.”

Caroline is a lot better now but I’ve got a big, painful bruise on my upper arm and it really hurts. 

********

I got a bit of a fright on Tuesday morning. I was in the kitchen when I suddenly realised that my right leg was shorter than the left one.  I walked up and down a couple of times to check it and realised that I was not imagining it.

“I’ve got a problem,” I said to Caroline and explained why.  “I think my replacement hip joint has slipped or snapped in some way.”

Before my hip replacement operation my right leg had been about two inches shorter than the other and it now seemed as though something had gone wrong.

“No it hasn’t.  You’re all right,” she said.  “Look at your feet.” 

I looked down to see that on my left foot was a thick-soled slip-on shoe while I was wearing a slipper on the other.  What a relief!

********

Before you leave my site for what is possibly the penultimate time, why not check my links if you haven’t already done so?  You can find them on the right of the page under the heading “My Blog List”. 

The first is Ian Quill : My World.  Ian is like me, a liver recipient.  He has been going through a bit of a bad time recently but things are looking brighter now.  He writes about his experience and the problems of living with Hepatitis C that he contracted as a result of a blood transfusion many years ago.  It was undiagnosed for a long time while the damage to his liver got worse.

Below that link is Alison Macleod Studio Jeweller.  Alison is Dugald and Joyce’s daughter.  You met those two in Hesperody.  I met Alison a couple of times in Cayman.  She designs and makes fine jewelry that is simple, beautiful and relatively inexpensive. 

She has outlets in Massachusetts, Sydney, Tokyo and Seoul and all over the UK in: Bakewell, Bristol, Chichester; Exeter; Holt, Leicester; London, Brick Lane E1; London, Clerkenwell EC1; London, Muswell Hill N10; London, Notting Hill W11; London, Pimlico SW1; Manchester; Taunton, Somerset; Penrith, Wellbeck, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kirkwall and Perth.

Below Alison’s link are four links to transplant organisations.  If you haven’t already done so, I urge you to sign up to allow your organs to be used after you no longer have any need for them.  One person can make a massive difference to at least seven people and their families.  In the UK you need to go to the NHS donor register: http://www.organdonation.nhs.uk

The link to Monken Hadley Common will be of interest to you if you live in or near to North London.  Even if you live elsewhere it may be of some interest, as it shows how a group of interested and concerned residents look after their local environment.  The Common is an area of managed open space of some 175 acres.  The link is here because Roger, whom you may have read about a few times in my ramblings, manages it.  Looking after it keeps him out of the pub and he spends a lot of time keeping it clear and environmentally healthy.  It has a long history and is a lovely tranquil area of open space and woodland and it is well worth visiting.

This is a photo taken on the evening of October 6^th last year in a restaurant where we went with friends to celebrate my other birthday.  Sandy brought the balloons.   I have no idea what the other diners made of it seeing a middle-aged man with a balloon saying, “Happy 2^nd Birthday”.

28. Half way?

I am not a deep thinker.  I don’t remember when I first realised it but thinking too deeply about anything is rarely a good idea.  I am a “glass half empty” kind of person too.  

In any situation, I imagine what is the worst-case scenario and then work out strategies to cope with it.  If the worst-case doesn’t happen (and it hardly ever does), everything is a lot better than just all right.

I was thinking about my father the other day and I remembered something that he had once said to me, and it started me thinking.  You may find it a little morbid but it interests me.

When I was 19, my Mum and Dad, my girlfriend and I went on holiday across Europe to Yugoslavia and Greece.  I remember being on the beach with my Dad at Zadar in Croatia when he said something about being more than halfway through his life.  The date was August 10th, 1966.  

Dad was born on September 22nd, 1923 and so on that day, he was 15,664 days old.  He died on July 28th, 1993 having lived for a total of 25,513 days.  So, he was right.  In fact, he had lived through 59.67% of his life.

(Yes, I know!  What kind of nerd works out that sort of thing?) 

Since then, I have wondered what my Dad was doing on the day that was exactly halfway through his life.  I have worked out that it would have been on August 25th, 1958.  It was a Monday and just less than a month before his 35th birthday.  I was eleven and a pupil at the school where he taught physics.  Peter, my brother, was nine.  

We spent that summer in Lowestoft and didn’t have a family holiday.  We rarely did.  Lowestoft’s north beach was far better than any French, Spanish or Italian beach and that’s where we went almost every day in August.

I can’t remember when I first realised that I was more than halfway through my life.  I still find it hard to accept that I am and only last week, I was trying to persuade Caroline that my 111th birthday party should be particularly spectacular - much grander even than my 110th.  

The only thing that I remember from reading ‘The Lord of the Rings' when I was 12, is the name of Gandalf’s horse (often useful in a pub quiz) and that the book begins with Bilbo Baggins’ eleventy first birthday.

I think that twice in my life have I come near to death.  The first time was when I was riding on my motor scooter in Durham City in June 1968.  In those days, Durham University was very popular with public school students who had failed to get into Oxford or Cambridge. 

Durham’s narrow streets were choked with the Morgans, Lotuses, Healey 3000s, MGs and at least one Marcos, bought for some of the more privileged students by their parents.  I had a ten-year-old Lambretta 125D motor scooter that I had bought for £25 with the money that I had earned from my summer vacation job with the Birds Eye frozen food factory in Lowestoft.  

Working 12-hour shifts on Quality Control (no skill or training required), I could earn as much as £95 a week.  To give you some idea of how good the pay was, in September 1969, my first ever monthly paycheque for teaching was £61.

Working on Quality Control at Birds Eye was a doddle.  The shift was from 6 until 6, day or night.  Sometimes my task was to put a sample of peas through a machine called a "tenderometer" to work out whether the crop was ready to harvest or not.  The samples would arrive from the fields in dribs and drabs but I was paid whether I was busy or not.  Some night shifts were very slow.

Occasionally, my job was to assess the quality of the work done by women on the production line but the women whose output quality I was controlling, either worked 7:30 am until 4:30 pm or from 10:00 pm until 6:00 am.  That meant that every working day or night I had lots of free time.  

I learnt loads of useful things during that time like how to play bridge and cribbage and from Stan, a 55-year-old full time, permanent employee, I was told of a foolproof way (so he insisted) to chat-up women.  “It usually works,” he said, “and if it doesn’t, you’ve saved a lot of time and money pissing about!” 

His foolproof strategy was that on the first date you wear a hat and take the girl to the cinema.  

“You sit down next to her on the back row, undo your zip and put your hat over your crotch.  Then, you whisper to her.”  He lowered his voice. 

“It’s under my hat if you want it.”

It may be as infallible as he said but I never tested it.

One night, I was controlling quality as usual, when things took a nasty turn.  I was in a large, isolated shed and inside there were four parallel conveyor belts and every one had 50 women seated on each side and so there were 400 women in the room - and me.  

These ladies were to carry out the last check before the peas dropped into 4 ounce packets and then disappeared to be frozen.  

As the zillions of peas passed them, the women removed extraneous vegetable matter (EVM) of which stalks and daisy heads were the most common.  Whatever got past the women went into a packet and was frozen minutes later. 

My job was to take random sealed packets as they came off the line before they went into the freezer, open them, spread the contents on to a tray and check for EVM.  I filled in a form tabulating my findings and then I analysed the results.  

If too much EVM was found, the line was stopped and all the peas that the women had checked went through the line a second time.  If a batch had to be rechecked the women lost bonus pay.  

One night, at about two in the morning, I warned the shop steward that I was finding a lot of EVM.  

“No, you’re not!” she said emphatically and walked off.

Half an hour later the line was stopped and 120 women glared at me in a way that I had never experienced before.  They sat in sullen silence for about twenty minutes and then the peas started to come through again.  

At 4:00 a.m. the line was stopped again.  I was in my work area sifting through a tray of peas.  I suddenly became aware that I was not alone. I looked up to see eight women - big women - including the shop steward, surrounding me.

Not a word was said.  They lifted me from my seat and carried me into an adjacent office.  Resistance was futile and within a minute they had completely removed my overalls and my underpants.  Then, they left, taking all my clothing with them.  

As they went out into the main body of the shed there were huge cheers and much applause.  One of them was waving my underpants around her head.

Anyway, my first dice with death came on Elvet Bridge in Durham City in June 1968.  Final exams were over and I was crossing the bridge, helmetless on my scooter, rushing to get from one pub to another.  A bus had stopped ahead of me and I overtook it as another bus was coming towards me.  

As that bus approached, a dog ran across the road and the bus driver swerved to avoid it.  (Don’t say he got his priorities right!).  My right shoulder and elbow were scraped along the bus’s entire length but I just managed to stay upright and alive.

My second close call came on the day that I had my liver transplant - October 6th, 2008.  I remember lying on my back on the table in the operating theatre.  I was a little drowsy but I was completely aware of what was going on.  I was somewhat apprehensive and I knew that ‘this was it’.  A man in a surgical gown, wearing a mask came over and introduced himself to me as my anaesthetist.  

“How long will all this take?” I asked him.

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m just curious,” I said.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said.  “If you wake up, it won’t matter how long it took and if you don’t wake up - you’ll be dead!”

Of course, I don’t know when my ‘halfway day’ actually was but I rather hope that it was then.  You’re all invited to my eleventy-first birthday party.  Make a note!  February 8th, 2058.  It’s a Friday.  

Make a long weekend of it and please don’t buy me socks.  I want a jet pack or a single-seat, anti-gravity, long-range hopper.