The final slice of tarte tatin remaining from our last dinner party lay before me, covered in cream. I savoured it for quite some moments, just as a starving survivor in a lifeboat might eye up the cabin boy for his next meal. Christmas was over, 2024 had begun, and the pudding in front of me was to be my last indulgence for some time. The Big Diet was about to begin.
That evening, in bed, I enquired (as I usually do) as to what delicious repast was awaiting me for breakfast, and was told, “a fry up”. This was a pleasant surprise, but I wasn’t going to argue and I lay my head on the pillow with great anticipation. Ten hours later I was gazing at the fruition of my dreams. On the plate lay a slice of fried bacon, fried mushrooms, fried cherry tomatoes and … broccoli. I had to do a double-take, lest my eyes, weakened by malnutrition, were deceiving me but, yes, it really was broccoli. The plate looked like nothing on earth. I had been lulled into a false sense of culinary security, of course. The diet had, indeed, started and this was the beginning. Actually it tasted all right, but I ask you… broccoli for breakfast?
The diet was in force, not for the usual post-Christmas overindulgence reasons, but because I had been putting on weight since starting my hormone treatment to combat prostate cancer last March, and the situation was becoming noticeable. According to the medical documentation, the side effects could equally have been a loss in weight, but Murphy’s Law has never failed me in the past, and here it was waving its metaphorical wand again. As to Jane: I am not sure why she has put on weight (if she has); I think it might be the digestive equivalent of a sympathetic pregnancy. Mind you, was there ever a more silly time to start a diet than January in the northern hemisphere? Many of us are doing it as a response to over-indulgence at Christmas, but it is just crazy. In January’s temperatures the body craves sustenance and carbohydrates: we should be eating pot mess, babies’ heads, beef cobbler or toad in the hole to keep warm, not lettuce and steamed salmon. I rather suspect that Jane and I will end up modifying the diet somewhat by continuing to exclude desserts and puddings, bread and cake, but keeping up with the Lancashire hotpot. Life is too short.
As some readers may take heart at the continuing success of my fight against prostate cancer, I feel that I should give it a brief mention. For some reason I had ended 2023 somewhat depressed about my chances of survival – the first time I have done so since the initial diagnosis in March. I had duly surfed the Internet to identify the relevant statistics. Naturally, this convinced me that I would be dead in five years, if not by tomorrow. Gloomily, I began contemplating the sale of my motor yacht, my tools, my lathe, my ship models, the contents of my wardrobe, my collection of cravats and waistcoats… It was in this frame of mind that I attended my first quarterly review in early January with the consultant oncologist, whose opinion I sought for a more accurate statistical figure for my demise. She was a very experienced and mature doctor, and her answer went on the lines of this:
“What nonsense is this? You have had comprehensive scans and the cancer never spread beyond your prostate. Your PSA is consistently zero. Radiotherapy has killed the cancer. As part of the trial you are on, you are now being additionally treated with the most expensive and best drugs that we can possibly give you. You are my youngest patient; my oldest is 91 and still enjoying life. There is no reason why you shouldn’t live to a similar age”.
It was just the thing I needed: robust, to the point, and honest. She even produced the 91-year-old for me to meet and, indeed, he was very fit and healthy. The consultation completely turned me around and I floated out of the hospital on a cloud of euphoria. My hormone treatment, which is a “belt and braces” approach and comprises quarterly injections and daily pills to inhibit the testosterone that feeds prostate cancer, will stop in 14 months. With any luck, the side effects will cease then too. In the meantime, back to the broccoli, porky. Onward and upward!
True to my prediction in the last blog, Jane and I decided to pursue our decision to purchase an artificial Christmas tree for next year and, true to character, Jane decreed that we should seek out a last minute bargain, namely a tree whose price had been reduced at The Big Garden Centre. My dislike of The Big Garden Centre has already been well documented (Blog 118) and so I was reluctant to participate in this arboreal adventure, but we compromised by parking the car in a nearby village and then walking to the centre, thus avoiding the carpark and the mud. It was 23 December and the usual Winter Wonderland described in Blog 118 was in full swing, but we were hardened veterans and we swept past the children, the pushchairs, the mummies and the grandmothers and headed straight for the Christmas tree display. There, believe it or not, (given our usual run of luck), we acquired a complete bargain: a £450 seven-foot artificial Christmas tree, with integral lights, reduced to £199. We snapped it up and it was delivered during the dead period between Christmas and New Year. I say delivered; it would be more accurate to say that what appeared to be a large body bag was heaved off the lorry with great difficulty and virtually dragged, with much grunting, to our front door to be deposited in our hall. In our excitement to obtain the tree, we had given little thought to its mass. It comprised three articulated sections, each with branches made from mild steel tubes and rods, linked by solid hinges. Even folded, it was enormous. We assembled it, of course, just to make sure that it was sound and that the lights worked, then took it apart and tried to stow it back in its bag – something it was reluctant to do, having revelled in its new-found freedom. We more-or-less managed it eventually and set to on the next task: storing the thing in the garage loft until next Christmas. There, the fun began, for it proved impossible to get the burden up through the loft hatch. I balanced on the loft ladder and heaved, Jane stood underneath and pushed, but it was no good: it was both too heavy for us and too big to enter the hatch. Jane wanted to leave it “somewhere in the workshop part of the garage”, but I pointed out that, even if we had the room, it would get covered in sawdust and we would end up sneezing throughout next Christmas. In the end, we had to take the sections of tree out of the bag and I rigged up a handy billy from the garage roof rafters, with quadruple purchase, to heave the sections into the loft. So glad that all that seamanship training at Dartmouth wasn’t wasted.
Christmas passed quietly for us, as it usually does. A persistent cough prevented me from attending any carol services or communions, but this cleared by Boxing Day and so we entered our first social engagement, an overnight visit by Carole and Raymond in transit to Dartmouth, with the avid enthusiasm of castaways greeting their saviours after several years on a desert island. Some drink was taken and a good time was had by all, but our guests were gone in a flash and we were soon on our lonesome again, preparing to end an awful year but with hope for the next one.
We do not have grandchildren, but most of our friends do. Chatting to those friends, we have found two common themes: that their grown-up children seem to believe that their parents have no lives of their own, and that their parents remain as fit and full of stamina as they always were. One corollary of these themes is that grandparents should be available at instant notice as babysitters, or used on a fixed day each week for the same purpose. The first supposition may not be quite so bad provided the grandparents are available, but the second is a commitment and may well disrupt any long term planning that the grandparents have in mind for their remaining years on Earth. Of course, all our friends with grandchildren truly love their little offspring and are happy to help, but all equally report – almost to a man – just how exhausting babysitting can be, even for just a day. Contrary to popular belief I would love to have had grandchildren, but it would grate with me to be taken for granted. As an illustration of my point, let me describe the circumstances of our friends Gregory and Lynne who, every Christmas, act as hosts for their three children and their families. Fourteen people in total from Zurich, Preston and Bath descend on our friends just before Christmas and Lynne is preparing meals for them from about October onwards, taking into account her guests’ fads, foibles, ethical beliefs and genuine allergies. Mattresses and camp beds are heaved up and down stairs for the event and a very good time is had by all; but our friends (in their late 70s) are exhausted when their offspring depart. This year, they showed us a picture of the dirty laundry that remained; it was about five feet high and was still being processed well into 2024. We took pity on them by providing a sumptuous lunch on New Year’s Day, after which they relaxed so much that Gregory fell asleep over the coffee. My point is not that this annual get together was unwelcome – on the contrary, Gregory and Lynne love having the company of their family, and all get on very well. Rather it is that is has never occurred to their offspring that the whole event is becoming exhausting and too much for them, and that they would probably welcome the offer of one of their children acting as hosts for a change, or the whole party decamping to a hotel for Christmas.
It has been a fairly stormy start to the new year for the British Isles, but I am relieved to report that almost every other part of the country has suffered from them apart from us in Melbury. Even our boat in Dartmouth has survived the onslaught. We have had no snow, no wind greater than Force 7, only a few sub-zero days and the rain – while plentiful – has not caused us any floods higher than the usual levels. I realise that many poor souls have been flooded out and their livelihood ruined, but merely point out that the hyperbolic warnings by the UK Meteorological Office (today’s offering was, “beware of snow bombs”) do not apply to everyone and can only serve to fuel the climate of fear that started with the Covid epidemic and has continued since. I was alive in 1953 when a massive storm, combining with adverse tidal conditions in the North Sea, flooded the east coast of England and killed about 300 people; I can remember the months of deep snow in 1963 which left Scotland cut off, isolated farms supplied by the RAF, and coal stocks so frozen that they could not be used; I experienced the bad winter of 1981/82 when Trowbridge was cut off and I could not get into the Ministry of Defence from my lodgings for several days. What we are experiencing now is what we older people call “winter”: a season which varies with time, sometimes very severe and sometimes mild.
One of my frequently uttered phrases as I wander around the highways and byways of our towns during the working day is, “Why is that child not at school?”. This is not solely because I aspire to emulate someone who is a cross between Mr Gradgrind and Mr Bumble the beadle, but because it is a characteristic of my generation. In the 1950s and 1960s a child wandering around out of school would have stood out like a sore thumb and, indeed, would have been challenged by a policeman. I am, thus, programmed to find the experience odd. Today, however, truancy is rife: 28% of parents believe that the Covid19 epidemic demonstrated that it is not essential for children to attend school every day; between a fifth and a quarter of children in England are currently absent from school on a long-term or permanent basis; and the authorities seem powerless to do anything about it. I find this impotence odd. In Flora Thompson’s semi-autobiographical novel From Lark Rise to Candleford (which was televised some years ago) the author describes rural life in north Oxfordshire in the late 19th century. One scene in the story features the sudden arrival of the School Attendance Officer at the home of the child who is the main character of the story. The date was 1880 or thereabouts, and the Education Act had been passed in England, requiring all children between the ages of five and ten to attend school. Children could no longer enjoy the pleasure of being free agents at home, picking daisies in the meadows, sweeping chimneys, or being deployed down coal mines. Parents of truants were visited and the full weight of the law could be used to enforce the act. Fast-forward about sixty years when World War 2 was in full flow. In her autobiography Will She Do? Act 1 of Life on Stage, the actress Dame Eileen Atkins describes how she was initially evacuated from London during the Blitz, but did not get on with the host family in Essex and so returned to her mother in London. She did not go to a school, but spent much of her time as a child entertainer. Despite the exigencies of war, her absence from proper schooling was noted by the authorities, and a School Attendance Officer was soon at her mother’s door, in a repeat of Flora Thompson’s experience. Do we not have School Attendance Officers today, prowling the streets or knocking on the doors of derelict parents? I gather that we do, but it would appear that they are on an uphill task because today’s parents are not the law-abiding souls of yesteryear. Some parents see no need for compulsory education of their children and, indeed, condone the truancy. Of course the lockdowns that were enforced during the Covid 19 epidemic have made a bad situation worse and the current level of truancy reflects the attitude of those workers who do not wish to return to the office to earn their pay. Additionally, we have a significant number of parents today who claim to be teaching their children at home. Yeh, right. I am very cynical that such a task can be done full-time, effectively and professionally from the age of five up to, say, sixteen. Even a parent who is a teacher would be hard-put to teach their child, say, grammar at one end of the scale and differential calculus at the other. There is, in any case, another dimension to schooling, namely the ability to mix, debate and generally get on with others from all walks of life. Children who are home-schooled miss out on all that. I am amazed that the authorities permit it. The final dimension, of course, is that some children on the streets and out of school are tempted to commit mischief and vandalism out of boredom – witness the increase in anti-social behaviour after schools break up for the summer holidays. We never had much graffiti when we were stuffing boys up chimneys, that’s what I say.
With the very cold, but settled, conditions it was inevitable that my dear wife’s mind should turn to her garden: not the weeding or cultivation, but the structural maintenance. Naturally, she turned to me, “Mr Fixit”, I being responsible for structural integrity and all things involving drill and screws. The object of her attention was the wires that support her malignant roses and burgeoning clematis to our boundary wall, all of which needed re-rigging. There was, of course, no getting out of the job and I duly kitted myself out in my gardening PPE, strapped on my leather utility belt complete with electric drill holster, assorted tools and first aid kit, and reported for duty. I spent two days on the job. Originally, we had used thin green garden wire on the wall, but that lasted only a year or two. We then tried thicker green wire, which also yielded in time. Finally, we graduated to galvanised thick wire, which held, but just did not look very neat – not tiddley and up to a seamanlike standard, if you follow me. So this time, after a persistent and well-co-ordinated campaign by Jane, I agreed to do a proper job. From Mr Amazon I ordered several metres of marine grade stainless steel wire rope to SAE316 standard, austenitic stainless steel ring bolts, SAE316 bow shackles, a hydraulic swaging tool and stainless steel thimbles. I told that wall that I meant business. Mind you, Jane’s plants did take some collateral damage – she seemed to think that these jobs could be done without me standing on the soil. There was the occasional crunch or squelch as a budding chlamydia (or whatever) fell under my jackboot and when I suggested that we hire a helicopter so that I could continue the work suspended from a trapeze like an actor playing Peter Pan I was accused of sarcasm (can you believe it?). Finally the job was done: none of your nonsense now – the whole rigging arrangement would do justice to a sloop entering the America’s Cup, and looked as solid as a rock. With an air of panache I restored my tools to the garage, walked up the garden path to view my work, and promptly tripped – falling flat on my face, bending my glasses, and hitting my head on a paving slab. Curiously, my left hand, which had taken the impact, suffered more than my face: badly bruised, it swelled up to such a degree that I was forced to cut off my signet ring with a pair of wire cutters. Ironically, this was the second time that I had had to cut off a ring in as many months – the first time was when I caught Signet Ring Number One on the companionway hatch of the boat and nearly wrenched off my finger (interestingly, a not uncommon accident in warships). I have now run out of signet rings and the plan is to take both damaged rings to a jeweller and have them melted down to make a wedding ring: something Jane has always wanted me to have. The estimate for the work is £300. Blimey. I think I will have the wedding ring engraved with the warning, “Keep your hands off this one – he’s mine”. Jane loves me and wants me, even if no-one else does. Oh bless.
29 January 2024
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 