… thinking that it was nice and quiet, and I could catch up on some of the outstanding dictation, some fool stood up on that stage that they erected on the steps of the Public Rooms and began to belt out some nonsense or other at full-volume.
He had quite a crowd gathered around him too so there were obviously plenty of people enjoying whatever it was that he was doing, but it didn’t ‘arf disrupt my plans for the early evening
And that’s a shame because, having had a good hour or two’s sleep just beforehand, I was fighting fit and raring to go. And as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, that’s not something that happens every day.
It wasn’t as if I’d had a good sleep during the night either. Once more, I was late going to bed – much closer to midnight than 23:00 – and then we had a calamity.
Whatever happened, I had no idea but I have never ever in my life seen so much blood in one place. My whole tee-shirt was absolutely wringing wet with blood and there were huge lumps of the semi-congealed stuff hanging from the inside.
“Discretion is the better part of valour” I thought here. Firstly I couldn’t see where the blood was coming from and secondly, I didn’t really want to find out. So I took the obvious course.
Five minutes later she was down here cleaning me up.
There was a small puncture on my shoulder and for a tiny, tiny wound like that it was pumping blood like there was no tomorrow. What had happened to cause it I don’t know, and I didn’t want to either.
However, my cleaner tells me that at least one of the medicaments that I’m taking is an anti-coagulant and she’s seen this kind of thing before with others of her clientele who take it.
She succeeded in patching me up, at least for the night, and warned me to be careful, not to get up to much in the way of indoor athletics in bed tonight. Chance would be a fine thing.
So after she left I had another go at trying to go to bed. Horribly late yet again. No matter how much I try, I’m never going to have an early night.
It was quite a restless night again and I was wide awake at about 06:00 and planning on making another early stary but I must have gone back to sleep because the next thing that I remember was the alarm going off at 07:00.
When I stood up, a blood-sodden mass of bandages and plasters fell to the ground. At least it had protected the would and wearing a tee-shirt had protected the bed.
It was still bleeding so I had a good wash and waited for the nurse to come.
In the meantime I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. And interesting it was as well. My mother and my aunt’s four aunts were all present in the same room – Auntie Gertie, Auntie Dollie, Auntie Mabel and Auntie Dorothy. They’d been collected from where they lived out and about and had been all brought together to stay at a particular place but something had come up which meant that the person whose relative they were who had invited them had to go away so these for aunts were busy finding a way around on their own. In the end they found a row of chairs but there was only three of them. They found another chair that was not belonging to this group of three but was somehow obliquely fastened across the end of the row so they imagined that that was where they were going to be sitting. They tried to work out who was the one who was meant to be on their own. There was a volunteer for this seat who went to sit in in. They said “it’s very near the kitchen” but she replied “yes but I like my kitchen very much and I’m pretty good at making all of the Sunday roasts” she said. I thought to myself “there’s certainly the stuff here to make the roast because there’s tons of food. There are definitely two main meals with meat that have been thought about and bought for which are lying around waiting to be cooked. Anyone could bung them into the oven”. I thought that at least those four aunts would be able to manage that. But they looked like the cheery thought of people anyway, at least, the ones who were doing the talking so I thought that maybe the fact that they were going to be here and no-one was looking after them for a while at least was not going to be a particular problem and they’d manage quite well on their own
My mother and her sister (my aunt) did indeed have four aunts although I’m not sure exactly how they were or became aunts. They were four very close relatives who may have been sisters, Dollie, Gertle, Mabel and Alice in fact. Some were Beavises and some were Ashness-Wellses. The Beavises were very well-known Quakers whose eldest son Stuart was a very famous Conscientious Objector in World War I and was sentenced to Death, something that must have upset my mother’s grandfather who, well over age, had dyed his hair and joined the Canadian Infantry. “Aunt Alice” lived in Birchington in Kent right at the end of the runway for Manston Airfield and at the Fall of France and bombs beginning to drop on British airfields and Aunt Alice’s house and garden, all of the kids in the village including my mother and her sister, were rounded up at a moment’s notice and armed with just a suitcase, evacuated out of the War Zone to live in safe areas with strangers whom they didn’t know. My mother and her sister ended up in Frome in Somerset.
Years ago I went on an expedition. I had remembered the addresses to which my mother had written letters and I remembered visiting some of the properties in Kent (Mabel and Dollie had shared a house in Ham Street near Ashford) as a tiny child so I went on a big trip of discovery and remembrance around southern England. And would you believe – the house in Birchington at the end of Manston Airport’s runway was still there, complete with modern roof – and it was for sale! Get thee behind me, Satan!
Later on I was with a former friend last night on the Brine Baths Estate in Nantwich. An old yellow Ford Transit drove past. My friend made a gesture as if he knew the driver and the driver made a gesture back so I asked about him. Eventually my friend explained that the driver was just some old guy who lived on the estate and did landscape gardening. He was never in any proper order. His books were always a mess, his finances were always up the creek. Everything about him was late. He had the old Transit which wasn’t taxed, wasn’t insured, wasn’t MoT’d and hadn’t been for years but he just used it for pottering around the Estate and going from one of his clients to another with his tools. He went around quite happily without any problems at all, although I must admit that I could envisage quite a few problems that he could be having if he were me and things were running as usual according to plan in that respect.
It was a shame that this dream never developed because I do actually know of this kind of activity going on in certain places so this isn’t news by any means. And for one reason or another I was half-expecting Zero to put in an appearance at some point.
Finally, what apparently upset everyone so much about my shoulder was that no-one seemed to be doing anything and I was losing blood at a really rapid rate and people were just standing around there as if it wasn’t an emergency. For the cleaner this was a serious problem. It could well have been a shrapnel wound or something like that from high explosive that could have killed me. Then they would have had some real problems with the crew of the ‘plane trying to get it back home to base.
It wouldn’t upset all that many people if I were bleeding to death. I’d just be dismissed as a bleeding nuisance and left to my own devices. And it’s a fact that any good psychiatrist will tell you that there are occasions where people won’t mind how much they are suffering as long as the object of their hatred is suffering more.
When the nurse came he cleaned up the wound and patched me up again and then organised my puttees and the wounds on my legs. He’s going to give me a pedicure tomorrow, he says. That should be interesting.
After he left I had breakfast and then had a very slow start to the day while I slowly warmed up. Once I was ready, I blitzed through the remainder of the radio notes that I’d started earlier in the week, so they are all complete and in the chain for dictation.
Lunch was a salad sandwich which made a very nice change, and then I tidied up in the kitchen. Stuff like crockery had been piling up in there needlessly and there were far too many odds and sods that didn’t have a home, but do now.
Things look so much better in there now, there’s room to move about and there’s more room to put things, Heaven help me.
Back in here I was going tp start work again but I fell asleep and had another one of those psychedelic experiences thanks to this anti-potassium stuff.
When I recovered I was going to dictate some stuff as I said, but not while that berk was performing so I began to choose the music for the next radio programme instead.
Tea was salad, baked potato and breadcrumbed quorn fillet, and my neighbour turned up in the nick of time with some tomatoes for me which was just as well.
So now that I’ve finished and it’s relatively quiet outside I’ll do some dictation before going to bed.
But I was thiking about that dream and the row of chairs for the aunts and how they must have come to be there.
Just picture the scene – someone crying "Could we have three chairs for the aunts?"
And there would inevitably be someone at the back who would shout "Hip Hip Hooray!"
but where its interest lies is that if ever you want to know where all of the humourists of the 1960s and early 70s like Monty Python and Marty Feldman obtained their ideas, it’s all here, everything and much more besides, and it was done in 1941.