137, Take Your Time, There’s No Rush

As I wrote in "Sorry About That Neville" (press to see), the only doctors’ surgery in Woburn Sands serves 11,000 people and those people are spread over more than 20 square miles.   Many of the elderly patients rely on volunteers performing a kind of taxi service.  I did another surgery run on Thursday. 

I ferried six patients who were either going to see a doctor or the nurse. My first passenger had a 10 o’clock appointment and my last was Ivy, whose appointment was at 11:00.  I picked her up after I had collected  Sarah, whose time was 10:50.  Ivy was not happy.

“I need to sit at the front,” she grumbled as she slid herself in a rather ungainly manner on to the rear seat

“So do I,” said Sarah, smugly, as she turned to look at Ivy with a self-satisfied look on her face.

The small car park at the surgery was full and so I dropped off the two women at the door.  Ivy was still grumbling as I drove off to look for somewhere on the road to park.

By the time I got into the waiting room, both women had been called and so I sat on my own and waited, playing a game on my phone.  After fifteen minutes, Sarah came out and approaching me said, “Come on.  Can we go?”

“No, we’ll have to wait for the other lady.”

“She’s having physiotherapy,” said Sarah.  “She’ll be at least half an hour and I’m meeting my son at The Swan for lunch.  Can we go please?”

Fifteen minutes later, after dropping Sarah at The Swan, I was back in the waiting room with no sign of Ivy.

Then I saw her, walking very slowly towards me.  As she approached, I smiled and said, “Hi.”  She was clearly still in a grump as she ignored me and carried on shuffling towards the door.  I caught up with her and asked if she was ready for me to drive her home.  She just grunted and followed me to the car.

We drove in silence.  I thought she would be happier now that she was sitting at the front but she seemed even more sullen.  We reached the High Street and I turned left down the hill.  

“Hey!  Where are we going?” she shouted.  

“Lower End,” I said.  “Your house.”

“I live in Russell Street.”

“What?  Aren’t you Ivy?”

“No, I’m Brenda.”

In my defence, I’d never actually seen Ivy’s face.  She had sat behind me in the car and all I knew of her was that she was a grey-haired, oldish woman with a walking stick - just like Brenda who, by the way, didn’t appear very grateful for the unexpected, free lift she was getting.  

At 12:10, back in the surgery waiting room, I began to wonder if I could have missed Ivy.  She had now been getting treatment for more than an hour.  Perhaps she had made her own way home while I was taking Sarah to the pub or Brenda to Russell Street.  I asked about her at Reception and the women there told me that they hadn’t seen her.

At 12:40 I was getting hungry and irritable and demanded that the receptionist ring the physiotherapist to ask how much longer Ivy would be.

The receptionist had a brief conversation on the phone and then she gave me a sort of apologetic, embarrassed smile.  “She’s been finished for more than half an hour and she’s sitting outside his room, around the corner there.”  She pointed.

Ivy was very chatty on the drive back to her house and told me all about the physiotherapy she’d just had and how she was looking forward to a “cup of coffee with a brandy, and a nice lie down”.

As she started to get out of my car, she suddenly asked if I knew of a good painter and decorator as she needed to get her windows done.  I told her I did and that if she gave me her phone number, I’d call her when I got home.

Neither of us had a pen and so she went into the house to get one.  The one o’clock news was just starting on the radio as I sat in the car and waited.

At 1:10, I started to worry that something had happened to her.  Perhaps the unusual exercise in the surgery had injured her in some way.  I got out of the car, went to her front door and pushed but it was locked.  I rang the bell several times but she didn’t appear.  Then, I opened the letter flap in the door and shouted her name as loudly as I could.  At last, I heard movement.

Ivy opened the door looking ruffled and confused.  

"Sorry about that," she said.  "I shut my eyes for a minute and just dropped off.  It's a pen we need, isn't it?  I’ll get one.”

 “Oh, don’t rush, Ivy.  There’s no hurry.  I’ve got all day.”

33. Foxes, Lions, Keys and Poo,

Occasionally, something happens that makes me think of Cayman and so I feel compelled to write about it.  

Ever since we moved back into our house, we have had a daily problem that we never had in Cayman.  Mosquitoes could be a nuisance in Cayman and occasionally the odd cockroach would be seen striding across the floor but that was about as far as problems with wildlife went.  

There were snakes in the grounds but none was dangerous.  Friends of ours living alongside the canals, which are actually inlets cut from the shoreline, would occasionally find scorpions in the house.

The only problems caused by wildlife were in the sea.  There was always an almost insignificant risk of being bitten be a barracuda or stung by a lionfish.  At certain times of the year, when the jellyfish larvae were in the water, there was the risk of contracting ‘sea itch’ which was very irritating and painful.  The last recorded shark attack was in 1850.

Bats are the only mammals indigenous to the Cayman Islands.  Some other species have been introduced in the last hundred years or so, such as the agouti, a kind of long legged rat.  There are an increasing number of feral dogs which can cause problems but there are no foxes.

However, there are a lot of foxes in North London.  There were a lot of foxes around in Winchmore Hill when we lived here before we went to Cayman.  We would often see one stretched out on the roof of our shed, basking in the sun but they never left little presents for us the way they do now. Having their excrement is bad enough but where they deposit it makes things worse.  It is always left on the paving slabs just outside our back door.

I’ve been on to the Internet and found out that this behaviour is common and is a way that the male fox marks his territory.  Joanna, Caroline’s sister has supplied us with a possible answer to the problem. 

In Islington (where else?) there is a Garden Centre that sells LION POO. I suppose that they get it from London Zoo.  

According to Joanna, once some of it has been scattered about, there will be no more foxes.  Apparently they smell it and think, “Bloody Hell!  A lion!  I’d better keep away from there,” but how foxes in North London recognise the scent of lion poo is a matter that I shan’t investigate too deeply.  Watch this space.  I’ll keep you up to date with developments.

Recently, we have been thinking about the security of our house and car. We have super-dooper locks on both our front and back doors as well as state-of-the-art window locks.  We have some kind of tracker device fitted somewhere in the car so that if it is ever stolen, the police will be able to find it almost immediately.  It’s all so different from life in Cayman.

We had locks on the doors and the windows of our seaside cottage but we hardly ever used them.  When we went out during the day the doors and windows were usually left wide open to allow the breeze to blow through and to keep the house cool.  

The alternative was to close and lock everything and to leave the air conditioning on.  That was very expensive and so it was cheaper and simpler to just leave the doors open. In five years we never had a problem.

At night the doors were shut but not always locked.  I locked them if I remembered to but there was no ritual about ‘locking up’ as there is now.

Things were the same with the car.  I wore shorts all the time and a bunch of keys was heavy and uncomfortable and so I usually left them in the car after I had parked and the car was therefore unlocked.  Twice this did cause a bit of a problem.

One evening Caroline and I were invited to a “Do” at Grand Old House, a restaurant on South Sound Road.  We arrived at 6:30 p.m. and I left the car, with the keys still in the ignition, in a disabled parking bay by the main entrance.  Five hours later when we were ready to go home the car had gone. 

“Didn’t you lock it?” asked one of our friends who was leaving at the same time.  Feeling a bit silly I admitted that we hadn’t and gratefully accepted his offer of a lift home.  He and his wife were very sympathetic and admitted that they rarely locked their car either but they did say that they didn’t usually leave the keys in as I had.

We walked across the car park and there, two away from his, was ours. It had been moved.  Not only had it been moved, it had been driven too. The radio was tuned to a station that I never listened to; there was an empty Burger King box on the passenger seat and the driver’s seat had been put back about three inches.  

Someone (a tall someone) had taken it joyriding and then kindly brought it back.

The first car we had on Cayman was a bright red Hyundai Atos.  It was small, cheap and reliable and there were quite a few of them around as Budget Car Rentals had sold off their old fleet. One morning I drove to the supermarket and came out with a trolley full of plastic carrier bags.  I pushed the trolley over to the car, opened the boot, loaded the shopping and drove home.  Upon arriving at home I carried the bags into the house, put the car keys on the shelf in the kitchen and put away the shopping.

Three or four hours later I went for my routine afternoon kip.  As I took off my shorts I heard a rattle.  I put my hand into the pocket to see what caused it and found that it was the car keys.  

The penny dropped.  

I scurried back to the kitchen and there on the shelf was a set of keys, which on inspection, I realised, was not mine.  I had two sets of Hyundai keys.

I hurried out to the car and saw immediately that it was not mine.  I rushed back to the supermarket and there, just where I had left it, was my car.  I locked up the other one – the car I had taken the shopping home in – and went in to customer services with the keys.  They were expecting me.  The owner of the other car had seen mine close by and put two and two together. He had left his contact details with the store and taken a taxi home.

I offered to reimburse his taxi fare but he wouldn’t hear of it.  He found it all very funny and that’s another way that Cayman is very different from England.