Aches & Pains (3 page)

Think positive. In hospitals they make you better. That’s meant to be – and is – their job.

That nurse is not a weasel. That nurse is probably a sort of angel. The nurse knows how bad it is not to feel well since a nurse’s whole working life is spent dealing with exactly such people. Most people fall in love with a nurse or at least want that
nurse to come home with them after the hospital stay.

If you go into hospital full of dire forebodings then you’ll surely find something that might live up to your gloomy expectations. Instead you should say very firmly on Day One that you have been told no kinder human beings exist on planet Earth than nurses, and no more worthy institutions were invented than hospitals.

Try to believe it, because it’s really almost true, and also try to say it in normal, sane, non-babbling tones. You’ll wonder afterwards why you listened for two seconds to the horror and doom people.

1) Tie your glasses around your neck and your hearing aid to your ear and your stick to your chair. These are all great gadgets that make life much easier. We should all have had them years ago. The only annoying thing about them is losing them or letting them fall. So don’t let that happen – tie them down.

2) Say getting old is challenging – never apologise about it. If you sit clamped in your chair as if you were tied down and padlocked, that’s how people will see you. Instead keep reminding them that Paul Newman said, ‘Old age ain’t for sissies’. It’s cool to have Paul in your corner.

3) Demand to be heard on the excellent grounds that you have been around longer than other people and more just might have rubbed off on you from sheer longevity.

4) Tell outrageous, scurrilous and mainly imaginary stories about well-known people long dead and unable to deny it all.

5) Be eccentric. You’re allowed now. Wear the cowboy hat and the feather boa that you’ve ached to wear for decades but were afraid people would think you looked silly in.

6) Tell everyone you are ten years older than you are. If you say you are seventy-five when you are actually sixty-five people will unaccountably be overcome with admiration. Never for a moment pretend to be younger.

7) Cultivate the friendship of very young people, your grandchildren and your friends’ grandchildren. Tell them how idiotic and confused their parents were at their age, and what frighteningly awful haircuts they had.

8) Don’t say everything was better in the old days, because it will only make you sound like a boring old fusspot. And really and truly, everything wasn’t better, you know.

1) Realise that the running of your home has totally collapsed to the point where your family have put it up for sale, refusing to be comforted; your cats and dogs are yowling to the moon, and the office is in complete chaos.

2) Decide that even worse than this, there is the possibility that everyone and everything is getting on perfectly fine without you.

3) If people don’t come to see you, send cards or enquire, accept and believe that they always hated you and this is just the proof you needed.

4) If people do come to visit, accept it’s because they heard you are terminally ill, or are guilty at having had an affair with your spouse.

5) If the hospital staff are young, shrewdly deduce that they are therefore raw and inexperienced, and if they are mature, that they are doddering and over the hill.

I spent two years of my life hiding the fact I was lame. Why? Because I foolishly feared that people might think I was over the hill and not give me work any more. And because I didn’t want endless discussion about it and pity.

So how did I hide it? Mainly by being in places much earlier than anyone else so that they didn’t see me limp in. If I was meeting people in a café, I would be well-installed before they arrived, and then let them leave ahead of me, pretending I had more work to do, or calls to make before I left, so they wouldn’t see me limping out.

I used to look at each short journey to be made and work out how many litter bins there were along the street. They are truly great things to sit on, and you can always pretend you are studying a map or reading a paper.

If I were invited to a function in a public place I’d telephone in advance and ask if I could have a barstool to sit on. If I were invited to a private house where people were expected to stand I would ask if they had a kitchen stool and perch myself on it in a nice handy area where it was possible to talk to everyone. I would ask people to my place rather than go to theirs.

I learned, and then immediately demanded that all my friends learn, to play bridge, which was nice and sedentary and no one knew whether you were lame or not. If ever I was going to stay in a hotel, I would write and say it didn’t matter what kind of room it was as long as it was near the lift. In a theatre or a cinema I would ask for an aisle seat near the back row.

If I hadn’t hidden it properly, and on a rare, insensitive occasion anybody asked me why I was limping,
I gave some totally unlikely explanation like a skiing accident, a fall from a trapeze, or a sexual experiment with a chandelier that had somehow misfired. It amused nobody but myself really, but no one ever asked again.

A quarter of the 206 bones in your body are in your feet.

When I was twenty-one my father gave me £100 and asked me to make a will. Well, I don’t think I ever enjoyed anything as much in my whole life. I sat in my bedroom sucking a pencil and bequeathing away all day long.

First I left my mother and father £40 each, which was an enormous amount of money then, and I wondered what they would do with it. My mother might have had a coach tour in Scotland. My father might have bought some nice bound books. I would leave my brother and two sisters and Agnes who lived with us £2 each, which would have bought them each a very nice treat and totally got them over the annoyance of losing me from the earth. And I was going to leave £2 to the cats’ home to thank it for providing us with Smokey, the noble and admirable half-Persian cat who had stalked through our youth without giving the slightest sign of recognising any of us and taught us all whatever independent streak we have.

But then there was a problem. There would only be £10 left. I wanted to leave £1 each to my friends and £1 to an enemy to make her feel remorseful that she hadn’t been much nicer to me. But I had twelve friends, so there wouldn’t be enough. And suppose, even more worryingly, that I had actually spent some of my inheritance so that there wouldn’t be enough on the day of reckoning? What would they do then? Interestingly it never crossed my mind that there might be any more than the £100.

I told my father that it was actually a great responsibility having to dispose of £100 justly and honourably and he sighed and told me that indeed it was. I didn’t want to take away the enormous legacies that I was giving to my parents. I couldn’t bear them to think I had been a cheapskate. And I didn’t want to short-change the family or friends either.

So eventually it came to me that if I were to give people percentages, things would work out fine. I wrote my will out in that form.

I knew you had to get it witnessed by two people
who were not going to benefit from it, and they didn’t have to know all the secrets you had in it, just to see you signing it was enough. I chose a couple whom I knew only slightly and brought my will along to them. I told them they wouldn’t be getting anything themselves in the way of a legacy, but since they worked in the local coffee house and saw that I was often pushed for the price of a cappuccino, I don’t think this came as any major disappointment to them.

And so my first will was made. During the next year the enemy left the country, two friends sort of faded away and I had three new ones. I also had a notion of leaving a small sum to the zoo so they would name an owl after me. It was time to make a new will, and I attacked it with gusto.

As I do every year. I have never been afraid of making wills – I love it. A very wise lawyer friend of mine once wrote that the only occasion when making a will might hasten your death is in the pages of an Agatha Christie novel.

Making a will empowers you. You can feel all generous, warm, giving and organised without having to give up a single thing. I have left my gold chain to a Scottish friend who once admired it, and I feel terrifically kind and decent every time I put it on, without ever having to let it out of my grasp.

You should never decide to make a will when you are on the way to the airport, about to take your first bungee jump, or in the middle of a paroxysm of coughing. You should make a will when you feel just
fine. You should also tell all your friends to make wills, too. I’ve shamed a great many people into it by saying in an aggrieved tone that I have left them marvellous things and will be deeply affronted if it turns out that they have left me nothing. Stress that you only want a keepsake, not the deeds of their house. That should reassure them and force them into will-making mood.

When it’s all written out in ordinary English you could go to a lawyer who will put in jargon for you. But you can just buy printed forms, and the home made versions are fine, too.