A pattern is emerging here.
I would never claim about my father – as I do, frequently, of my mother – that he was perfect.
Most of us are not. (Except, of course, my mother.)
He would never have claimed this of himself. Indeed, he was the last person in the world to have done so. He often said true artists are those who are never satisfied with their work. And the same could be said of saints: the best are those most aware that they are not.
My father was inspiring; kind; generous; enlightened; self-giving; dedicated. A visionary. Way ahead of his time. And showed very good taste when he fell in love.
It so happened that he often claimed, in old age, to have reached a time in life when he had learnt to do as he was told…
Well, ahem, Lord Copper. Sure. When it was something he didn’t care about at all. What he ate for dinner, for instance. Or… let’s see… what kind of whisky he drank.
In other ways, he could be the mountain Mohammed needed to go to.
This much has been obvious already, right? Someone who goes in the sea when it’s snowing is possessed of a steely nerve.
Now, this could be both a good thing… sometimes. Often indeed. Mostly, I’d say. And then again, occasionally… if not exactly a bad thing, certainly a tad trying.
Let me tell you, those of you who are near the point of giving your parents who are full of years somewhere to end those years.
Doing so is a Very Good Thing. Indeed.
But there will come days…
I haven’t done the in-depth statistical research yet to demonstrate this as conclusively as I would like, but I’ll bet you a lot more than I would put on any horse tipped by Gary Richardson on the Today Programme, that parents who are fortunate enough to live with their offspring have a life-expectancy staggeringly higher than those who don’t.
For the simple reason that part of your job, when you house your parents, is to save their lives on a regular basis.
I lost count of the threatening letters I fired off to the GPs’ surgery offering to report them for the statutory £100 fine that would land on their mat if they didn’t have a doctor in our house by lunchtime and I had to call an ambulance instead.
Yes, that is the law. Or a directive that applies to GPs’ surgeries anyway. There are all sorts of services we are legally entitled to that the Cerberuses on the doctors’ Reception Desks are doggedly determined to deny us.
On one occasion, a doctor asked me if my father’s home visit could wait till tomorrow. I mean, what a thing to ask! How do I know? That’s what the doc himself spent years of taxpayers’ money training to discern, surely?
Well, I said. Tomorrow will do fine, I said. If my father’s still alive.
Less optimal if he dies tonight.
Which frankly, I said, I suspect he quite likely might.
And he would have done. By the time we reached hospital that very same evening, a few hours later, his pulse was seventeen.
For the non-medical of readers, that is on the low side. If your heartbeat is currently measuring seventeen to the minute, take it from me: you’re unlikely to reach the end of this post.
(And when it gets to nought to the minute, you haven’t.)
Put it another way: they wheeled him off pretty smartly to under the nose of the pulse consultant after they measured it. As if propelled by a horse not tipped by Gary Richardson.
Thing is, it’s all very well doing battle with the services.
But quite often, we’d have to be doing a different kind of battle altogether, with my father himself. And this was a lot trickier.
As has been observed by someone slightly more successful than I:
he hates him,
That would vpon the wracke of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.
The last thing any of us wants is to prolong the life of someone we love, through an increasingly incapacitated, painful and extremely old age, when he’s dying (as it were) to be off rejoining the love of his life on another shore.
So we were constantly having to weigh this up.
Which was why my heart leapt for joy and far more surprise, given how much my father moaned from time to time about still being alive while my mother wasn't, when the first thing he asked that cardiologist was, Can you do anything for me?
And the cardiologist said, Easy peasy, matey. We’ll shove a pacemaker in you in a jiffy, and you’ll be home for breakfast.
Yes, cardiology is like that, my cardiologist friend said. Ticker on the blink. Have a new ticker. Very simple and successful process.
So my father obviously wanted to live a little longer. And indeed, after that night and fright, I don’t believe he ever moaned again. Not about being alive, anyway.
Until he was actually dying, and couldn’t understand why it took God until Monday to call him home when he’d had his heavenly baggage packed since Friday. I did explain in a previous post that he was never a patient man.
However, he hated hospital with a passion. Like me, he loathed being bossed about. So every time we saved his life, we had to take on my father himself.
And that was a formidable task.
Nevertheless, every time I did so – every time I had to overcome my father’s obstinacy, stubbornness and colossally powerful will to get him to accept medical help to prolong his life – I realised that this was why his life was so long in the first place.
Because he he had such an admirably strong will, and character, and independence. Because he jolly well did things his way. (He was a Conscientious Objector in the 1930s, for goodness’ sake. Which believe me – like old age – was not for sissies.)
Because he was not going to lie down and die until he himself was ready.
(Which happened to be when God was busy for the weekend.)
Tum-te-tum and tra-la…
Genes are a funny thing.
They come out in the next generation. Or so.
I’ve described my astonishment at realising that I, too, had swum (well, dipped) in the outdoor waves, in snowy weather. Just like my father.
I will not give up keeping bees even though their stings have been known to bring me out in anaphylactic shock, and always swell me up for a week.
Do we detect a familial theme?
So here we have a picture of our Burns’ Night supper.
First course, Scots mussels.
To which I am also allergic. Well, not to their ethnicity, strictly speaking. Any mussels will do it.
First and second time I tried them, they very violently returned from whence they came.
However, given that I have inherited my father’s, um, bloody-mindedness for want of a better term.
Was I going to give up?
Was I!
Ever since that first and extremely unpleasant experience, when I was thirteen, I’ve been dabbling with the things.
Can I eat one, without being extremely ill? Yup. One seemed ok.
What about three or four? Slightly queasy stomach.
In my thirties, I found myself having to eat a whole plateful of them. Tricky situation. I was the only guest at a very small supper party and my hostess’s sister, over from Italy, had made a very special treat for me… I had just seconds, when the platter was brought in to the fanfare, to decide which way to jump.
Honesty? Or manners?
I opted for the latter, just managed to get through the film we went on to together, got home and threw up all night until morning.
So then I had to start the regime all over again. Paella? I’d put half of them on the side of the plate and risk the other half.
I never actually enjoyed the slimy things. The thought of what they might do to me in an hour or two was always slightly off-putting.
But the thought of being beaten by them was far more of an anathema.
So it came about that on Burns’ Night, when Shaun served a huge great big dish of them as the first course (yes, of course, knowing the effect they have on me) I thought, let’s go for this.
Now or never.
And for the first time in my life – certainly since I was thirteen, when I can’t remember the experience of actually eating them because the ensuing night’s agony blitzed out all lesser memory – I found them tasty. Delicious. And the wine juice they were served in was gorgeously slurptious.
I believe in listening to my body. At least, when it’s telling me what I want to hear.
So I had a whole grown up bowlful.
And then I had seconds.
And loved them.
And I wasn’t ill at all. In fact, I was so not-ill, that I’ve only just remembered this morning that I ate loads of mussels on Monday night, just like a normal person, and they haven’t done anything to me since…
