Aches & Pains (4 page)

Never start to brood darkly about the words ‘Last Will and Testament’. Think, this one is the last one until the next time.

Don’t say ‘If I die’. We all do sometime, as it happens. Say ‘When I die’ or ‘After my death’.

Don’t say ‘I leave all my money’. That could mean the £10 in your wallet. Instead refer to it as your ‘estate’.

Say where things are – ‘I leave all the Gene Pitney tapes, which are in a box under the stairs …’

Say something schmaltzy and feel-good. I have left a decanter to someone with the sentence: ‘In memory of all the happy bottles of wine we shared together’.

Finding your will is not meant to be a game of hide-and-seek.
Leave it in the bank, or your desk, somewhere the beneficiaries won’t need radar or sniffer dogs to detect it.

Caraway seeds, finely pounded with a small
proportion of ginger and salt, spread upon bread
and butter and eaten every day, especially early in
the morning and at night before going to bed, is a
good remedy against hysterics.

(
The Housewife’s Receipt Book
, 1837)

A lot of the aids advertised in catalogues for the disabled or indeed the elderly, and available in stores, are extraordinarily useful for those who as yet have no official need for them. It’s a wise person who becomes familiar with such items ahead of the posse.

– A safety rail for the shower. You might not need it to hang onto yet, but it’s very helpful when you’re washing your hair and are blind as a bat.

– Those bookholder things they have for recipe books also work splendidly for your ordinary reading.

– A piece of strong ribbon or a scarf tied to the car door handle, so that you can pull it shut without straining.

– A one-hand tray that has a kind of basket handle is terrific for going out to the garden or just upstairs.

– Long-handled shoehorns and elastic shoelaces make good sense at any age.

– Velcro fastenings are a hell of a lot easier than buttons in the places that are hard to reach.

– Raised flowerbeds. Have them in the garden
now
, not later. You can always lean on them with a drink in your hand and do a bit of absent-minded gardening.

– A ‘goods upwards’ box or basket on the bottom step saves on trips upstairs, where it becomes a ‘goods downwards’ receptacle for things that want to descend.

– A long-handled dustpan is a joyous thing. You’ll wonder why they ever made the other kind.

– A pick-up stick is a delightful tool for anything from reaching a hard-to-get book from a high shelf to picking up a piece of newspaper that has blown away.

I loved being sick when I was young because I got even more attention than usual. I was allowed to have the big radio in my room, plugged into the wall and standing on a chair. There was a siphon of red lemonade just for me. Nothing was too much trouble and there was huge concern and sympathy.

And of course, I always knew that I would get better eventually, hopefully in time for a party and not in time for the maths exam. For children there is none of that awful ‘wondering what it is’ business about being ill. They don’t go through a mental checklist imagining every headache to be a brain tumour and every wheeze inoperable lung cancer, so in a way they are luckier than the rest of us. All they have to do is put up with the symptoms and wait for them to pass.

But nothing is as stomach churning for parents as looking at a sick child; they are so vulnerable and so different to their normal noisy selves. Had I been a mother myself, I think I never would have survived a child’s illness. I’d definitely have needed oxygen just watching whooping cough, and I feel sure I’d have been the one that had to be admitted into Intensive Care if there were an accident of any kind.

Which is why I so admire the way that all the parents I know do cope. They seem to think that the scratches and scrapes and bruises and to my mind near death experiences just go with the territory. Are
parents much better and calmer these days? They were certainly more alarmist years ago. Every summer when we went on our seaside holiday there were huge warnings about how dangerous the coast was, and indeed it was true; somebody drowned every summer at that resort. Whenever the cry went up that there was a swimmer in difficulties, every mother and father looked around in blind panic for their own brood, and when they found their children sitting harmlessly making sand-castles a few feet away they often went up and beat the arms and legs off them out of sheer relief. Which seemed very unreasonable, to say the least.

Today’s parents seem to me much less flustered. I know a mother who starts to wail whenever her son has a cut knee. She makes such a fuss that eventually he stops crying himself to reassure her that everything is all right.

I know a father who tells his children that a fall from a bicycle or a cut knee is not important in itself but it does involve a lowering of blood sugar. This is pronounced very seriously as in a medical diagnosis, and the solution is proposed that to raise it again all that is required is a square of chocolate. This isn’t offered as a distraction or a bribe to stop crying, but as a proven medical remedy. Together they wait to see if it has worked, and soon the hurt child will agree that the blood sugar is back to normal and life can go on.

I was minding an eight-year-old who got up suddenly and unexpectedly from a game of Chinese
checkers and went out and vomited. He was perfectly fine. I was the one who was certain he had meningitis or food poisoning and was practising how to tell his parents that he had died in my care. But of course he had been brought up by people who panicked much less than I did.

‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured me. ‘It’s just that the body doesn’t like something so it’s sending it back.’

There’s a mother who congratulates her children on getting measles or chicken-pox as if they had won some kind of race: ‘Aren’t you great, you’ve got it at nine, I was twelve before I got it’. And they feel vaguely triumphant.

For most children, a long-term illness is one that means a week off school. They don’t worry about the future the way we would. An accident is just a tree, a gate or a wall that was in the wrong place, not a sign that they are getting feeble and becoming geriatric.

And children just assume that other people who know about such things will cure the problem. We have a lot to learn from them.

Aren’t you a lovely big girl?

Are you a good little boy?

What’s your favourite subject at school?

Don’t you remember me?

Do you know you have chocolate all round your mouth?

Will you give me a kiss goodbye?

We should all think very positively about this whole business of having blood pressure taken.

It doesn’t hurt.

There are no needles involved.

You don’t see any blood.

It’s only being done to find out if there is a danger of a heart attack or stroke.

It’s just somebody putting a bandage on your arm and squeezing tightly.

It measures the highest pressure (systolic) of the heart’s beat and also the lowest pressure (diastolic). Learn those two words just to show off.

They like it to be 130 over 80. That’s 130 systolic and 80 diastolic. But that’s just perfectionist. It will probably be a bit different.

Don’t worry.

The solution is little pills.

You might have to take them all your life. They’re no trouble.

Almost half the people you know are taking them.

Of course, if it’s too high they’ll tell you a few things like:

Stop smoking.

Cut down the alcohol.

Mind your diet.

Take more exercise.

Cut out the salt.

But you
knew
all that, didn’t you?

When I was young I used to pretend to be brave because I was big, and big people aren’t ever allowed to be afraid. Somehow we were meant to be able to cope single-handed at the age of seven with the great hound with slavering jaws that I always thought was around the next corner.

I was afraid to go to England in case I might be eaten by a snake because St Patrick hadn’t banished them from there, and I was distinctly worried in case I looked up into a tree, saw a vision and became a saint and quite possibly a martyr, since the two often went together.

I was afraid of the dark and hated going upstairs in case a terrible monster was lurking in the box room. I was afraid to climb a tree in case I fell, I was afraid whenever I saw the doctor in case he might think I needed an injection or vaccination against something. I was terrified that the dentist would get distracted by something else and drill through my head. I watched buses and lorries carefully in case they suddenly left the road and ploughed into me.

Whenever I saw an ambulance or fire engine I thought it was going to our house. I had read somewhere
about a European royal family having some disease which meant if they started to bleed they never stopped; I thought I might have it too, so feared it was curtains if I cut myself at all.

I jumped four feet at a loud noise; I thought the sound of leaves in the wind was a burglar; I feared a tidal wave coming in and submerging Dublin. I was always looking at the sky edgily in case a comet was coming towards us, and I thought I saw the Devil on four totally separate occasions.

All in all I was a bag of nerves as a child and yet I grew up into a fairly fearless, reckless kind of adult. But because I remember what it was like to be utterly terrified of almost everything, I am actually most sympathetic to those who think people are drilling into their homes and will come up through the floor any minute, or that they will be beaten to a pulp by the first people they meet if they are mad enough to go abroad.

How did I get the courage of a lion and stop whimpering? Well, first because of something my father once said as we looked at Smokey, the totally deranged cat, creeping around stalking an autumn leaf which was frightening him to death.

My father said it was natural for all animals including humans to have this sense of fear. Otherwise we’d walk into the most desperate situations and wouldn’t survive, and that’s why our hearts started to race and our breathing began to get fast, and that this was called a state of fight or flight. I found this very cheering, since I had recently been
having a bit of a problem with shadows on a bus shelter which I had been fairly sure were escaped gorillas.