Charging Around by Clive Wilkinson

Author:Clive Wilkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-12-09T15:06:41+00:00

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44 Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside, Phoenix, 2000, p377.

45 A E Trueman, Geology and Scenery in England and Wales, Penguin Books, 1967, p132..

46 IPPR (Institute for Public Policy Research), 2019, State of the North.

13

Ladies Out!

As the years pass, you notice that your social life filters down to regular meetings with a diminishing circle of friends, especially when you gather to give yet another one a good send-off to their final destination. Conversations are different from those of the happy-go-lucky days of the youth that was wasted on you because you were too young to appreciate it. They tend to involve a game of one-up-manship, based on who can tell the best yarn about failing health.

I was at such an event recently when Ken came along and greeted a small group of us who knew one another from the drama society. As we waited to say farewell to one of our friends, Ken opened the topic of the day.

‘Morning all,’ he said. ‘How’re you doing?’

‘Yeah, we’re great, Ken. How’re you?’

‘Not so great, to tell you the truth. It’s this catheter. It’s uncomfortable. Keep having to make lots of adjustments. Keeps me awake at night, too. Doesn’t make Margaret very happy.’

‘Oh dear,’ we all commiserated.

‘Yeah. To put it bluntly, I’m pissed-off.’

‘Know what you mean,’ said Alex enthusiastically. ‘I’m having problems with my ball.’

‘Which one?’ Duncan asked.

‘The one in my hip. Waiting to get a new one, a steel one.’

‘Ah, steel,’ said Duncan. ‘Good conductor of electricity. Get it done as soon as you can. It’ll be good for you.’

‘How so?’

‘Well,’ interjected Fran, Duncan’s wife. ‘He’d been fiddling around with something electrical when I heard this scream. I rushed through to find him dangling on the end of a wire, hands and legs shooting out all over the place as if he was electrocuted.’

‘I was electrocuted,’ Duncan said.

‘Anyway, since then he’s never been so fit,’ Fran said.

‘Yeah,’ said Duncan. ‘I used to have an irregular heartbeat, atrial fibrillation, but now it’s gone. Heartbeat’s perfectly regular. Problem solved.’

‘Do you think I should try electrocuting myself?’ I said to Joan afterwards. ‘Might save all those tablets.’

‘Could go wrong, though,’ she said.

I thought of all of this when Joan and I arrived at the Whittington and Cat in Hull. It had this name because the guy who walked all the way to London with not a penny to his name and just a cat for company is reputed to have stayed there. We could see no other reason for it to have a four-star rating. We could see how a young chap like Dick Whittington, having walked all day, would have been happy with anything reasonably flat to lie down on. But we weren’t young and we’d got fussy in our old age. Our priorities had changed. One of our priorities was comfort at night, and when a hotel has been given a four-star rating, we expect the service to match the offer.

To give the management its

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