Aches & Pains (6 page)

In theory – in someone’s mad theory – you are meant to be able to do it yourself. It’s all a matter of getting the heel in the right place and then pulling the stocking up with a pick-up stick.

That doesn’t work. The heel is never in the right place and the pick-up stick keeps losing the stocking or tearing it. You really need the services of a good kind spouse, partner, relative, friend, or passer-by. Someone firm enough to refuse to let you grow fungus on your legs by allowing you some days’ respite between the changes. Someone technical enough to work out the amazing geometry of getting the heel on first. Someone kind enough to put up with all the ungrateful yelps and groans. Someone far-sighted and optimistic enough to realise that this is unlikely to be forever, who realises that one blissful day the authorities will allow you to let your legs run free again.

1) A dozen stamped postcards to write short thank-you letters or accounts of their ailments to the outside world.

2) A laptop tray, a thing with a flat top and a bean bag bottom, which doesn’t slide off the bed.

3) An artificial silk flower that won’t eat the oxygen, need any water, annoy the nurses, or die and upset everyone.

4) A bar of ludicrously expensive designer soap that no one would ever buy in real life.

5) The loan of a Walkman or tape recorder and three talking books.

6) A bottle of really good salad dressing or vinaigrette. Hospital food can be very bland; this cheers up almost everything but the semolina.

7) Gossipy and silly magazines. Energetic sporting, mountaineering and boxing publications can make the weak feel weaker still.

8) For women: a pinkish scarf to drape around the shoulders is inclined to make the greyest face look a bit more lively.

9) For men: a small bottle of expensive cologne to slap around his chops and make him feel more desirable.

10) Some vague proof, in the form of a card with many signatures on it, that friends, family, neighbours or colleagues have not forgotten the patient.

Fumigation with brimstone or the fresh leaves of pennyroyal sewed in a bag and laid on the bed will have the desired effect.

(
The School of Arts, or Fountain of Knowledge
,
Mrs de Salis, 1890)

You have far too much hair and look like a monkey

You have too little hair and will shortly go totally bald

Your eyes are too wide open, making you look mad and staring

You have drooping eyelids and look like a criminal and a vulture

Your tongue is white and unhealthy looking

Your tongue is red and dangerous looking

Your bosom is too small and flat and dull

Your bosom is too big and floppy and disappointing

Your skin is oily and greasy and full of harmful impurities

Your skin is dry and flaky and about to fall off in chunks

Your private parts are small, pathetic and insignificant

Your private parts are huge, obviously deformed and revolting

Your knees are weak and give way all the time

Your knees are stiff and unyielding

Your feet are hard and scaly and disgusting

Your feet are soft and mushy and disgusting

Years ago I had this great notion, which was that together with all our friends we should go into an old people’s home long before we were really old, but while we were young enough to enjoy it. It seemed the perfect solution to everything.

We would all sell our houses and take a wing together. We would hire a part-time waiter to bring us gins and tonics on a tray with a folded white table napkin over his arm. We would be looked after, we would have company, we could move from room to room playing bad bridge. We could take over a lounge for ourselves and have parties. We wouldn’t have to worry about our friends coming to see us because they would all be there.

If we had children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces, they would be delighted not to have to worry about us as we got feebler. They could have all our furniture and our treasures now rather than later. They would visit us because we would all be such fun, growing older without a care in the world.

We wouldn’t be tormented with fear of losing our keys, or burglars or conmen or burst pipes or setting the house on fire or getting malnourished, because the home would look after all that side of things.

We would have no sense of being beached, no lingering resentment that we should possibly be living with relations, because after all we chose this ourselves.

It seemed such a flawless idea that we were almost ready to go in straight away. Even though we were decades below the age that one might expect people to consider such a step, we started sussing out places of residential care.

Somebody said that if this was such a great idea why had nobody thought of it before?

And then they all got restless. There had to be a snag in it somewhere.

I was just forty at the time and very keen to go in that year. I couldn’t see where the problems were suddenly coming from, so to rid everyone of anxieties I decided to test out the theory by writing an article about the whole idea in the
Irish Times
.

It met with the kind of mild patronising approval which annoyed me intensely. It was as if I were being patted on the head for a silly, off-the-wall, humorous look at the future, while I thought I had sorted out a whole area of angst, potential loneliness and confusion for an entire generation.

We were the people who would provide the smooth transition from the extended family concept, where everyone took in their grandparents automatically, to a world where housing, the economy and society meant that adults made their own arrangements for old age. But nobody was taking me seriously.

And then the two most boring people in the whole country wrote to the newspaper and said they would like to join us in all this, and where would they pay their deposit.

Now, I am very sure that people may well cross roads to avoid talking to me, but these are people who would empty a stadium if they were seen to approach. They could bore at Olympic competitions, bore not just for the nation but for the planet.

In vain did I tell my friends that we didn’t have to have them with us. We could tell them politely that the subscription had now closed, that they would have to start their own. This was the whole essence of the idea, I begged them to believe. The idea was that groups of like-minded people should form an ageing commune of their own with people of shared interests.

But the very mention of the two awful and frightening people had destroyed the fragile edifice. My friends kept thinking of how awful it would be if you thought you might meet them at breakfast every single day of your life, or hear them booming around the place with their entirely unacceptable views.

We all decided reluctantly that we would live in our own places until the time came, with no plans, and take whatever happened. So it was over, the dream that might have changed society.

But perhaps some day someone else might reinstate it. A word of warning, however. Just do it quietly. Don’t write anything about it in a newspaper.

I once went to a women journalists’ conference in Central America where so much went wrong and the stress was so high that if there had been an Intensive Care Unit within miles I think all 600 participants would have been in it.

The hotel booking system was so bad we slept three to a room, and one of my room-mates woke in the night with terrible chest pains. One of the waitresses was a third-year medical student, and since she was all we had, she stood there in her nightie while frightened women in all languages tried to interpret for each other by candle-light, since the generator had gone again.

I hope by now she is an acclaimed heart specialist in her own land, that young girl who reassured everyone in sight. She stood there in the candle-light telling us that it need not be what we all feared.

‘You see, the chest she ees a beeg complex structure. The chest, she has many major organs. As well as the heart, the pain could be in these. She has the ribs, and they could be cracked like firewood. The chest, she has the muscles, and these could be strained by too much sex or climbing around the ruins. The chest is also the area where unwisely chosen food could cause the indigestion.’

A little colour was coming back to the face of our room-mate. The banquet – when we’d eventually found it – had offered a rather leathery sausage. Please may this be what it was.

But the waitress was not finished. ‘The chest, she ees so interesting she could hold the pleurisy, the bronchitis …’ She beamed at all the things the chest could hold which might not be a fatal heart attack.

And now, decades later, women from forty countries have remembered her calm round face, her lack of fear, her insistence that we didn’t all choose the worst-case scenario. Not only was she right then but
I imagine she has been right for all of us who had a chest pain sometime and were able to call up her wonderful, calming words:

‘The chest, she ees a beeg complex structure …’

A sneeze can travel as fast as 100 miles per hour.

Dear Friend

This letter was started by a woman like yourself in hopes of bringing relief to other tired and discontented women. Unlike most chain letters this one does not cost you anything.

You bundle up your husband, partner or boyfriend and send him to the woman whose name appears at the top of this list. Then add your own name to the bottom of the list and send a copy of this letter to five of your friends who are equally tired and discontented.

When you come to the top of the list you will receive 3,125 men and some of them are bound to be better than the one you gave up.

DO NOT BREAK THIS CHAIN. One woman did and she received her own man back.

As in everything else, I was a late starter. For one thing, I didn’t like the taste. We always had whiskey on a piece of cotton wool to cure a toothache, and it had bad associations. For another, everyone I met who did drink alcohol seemed to be racked with guilt, penniless and feeling very sick indeed. They didn’t go on with all this ‘never again’ thing about cream buns or chocolate or even ten Woodbine. But fellows after too many pints and girls after too many sherries seemed to be in the last stages of remorse. Drink didn’t seem to have all that much to recommend it.