A Human Love Story by Matt Hopwood

Author:Matt Hopwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

15. What’s the Problem?

I am sitting, listening. I don’t have any words or thoughts of reassurance; I have not been where you have been, my friend. I hope you take my silence as an offering of solidarity, of abiding. It is night outside. A street lamp flickers. My eyes are growing heavy with sleep, I sink deeper into my chair, warmth enveloping me like a blanket.

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‘What’s the problem?’ and he says, ‘I need to get to the toilet from the bed and I’m getting measured for a walking stick. So they’re going to send someone out and they’re going to measure me and then they’re going to measure my stick. And then they’re going to order it from the hospital. Then they’re going to do this and that and . . .’ I’m thinking, ‘That’ll take ages!’ I remember him saying, from twenty years ago, that he’d been up the lakes, and things like this, and he went on about this walking stick. It was all carved and beautiful, and he described it in perfect detail. So, I thought, he’d probably want something like that. I thought I’d get up early the next day and go through to Edinburgh. I hunted up the High Street. I walked everywhere – I couldn’t find the one he was after. And I was just about to go home when I saw this barbershop. I went in there and I had a look at all their things and I found this perfect one! I thought, ‘That’s brilliant!’

So I came home, gave it to him and he just burst into tears. And I thought, ‘I don’t understand this because it’s only a walking stick.’ But the fact that I’d spent the whole day looking for it, came back at five o’clock at night, gave it to him so he could get from the bed to the toilet. He was just so grateful.

But he could only use it for three days, and that was him.

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