A welcome break from the general pattern of my life through interruptions and distractions

My life is full of interruptions and distractions which are almost always welcomed as a break from my incessant but definitely not Herculean labours…

…It was almost as though Alexa (the Smart Speaker which announces that someone has pressed our doorbell) was unwilling to tell me. “There is somebody at the door,” she whispered, so huskily that I feared she may have been having an asthma attack. I’m sure that, if she could have found the breath, she would have added, “Of course, you don’t have to answer it.” Nevertheless, I did… They came with an attempt to capture all souls and, I presume, the entire demographic (or at least fifty percent of it) with a very young and attractive woman accompanied by a truly ancient one (no less attractive in her day, I’m sure) who appeared to be on the point of collapse throughout our entire – admittedly short – conversation. She smiled – a lot – I think (although it could have been some kind of rigor) but did not speak. All conversation was conducted by the younger woman who congratulated me because she came bearing an invitation to ‘a party’ at The Meeting House with ‘no cost and no obligation’ to myself. “Well, that sounds like fun,” I thought. I might even have been tempted to go if they’d had a bar. Instead I politely accepted the gracious offer of a free leaflet and watched them leave, the more able of the duo virtually carrying her elder along the driveway. I always knew that Methuselah must have had a mother, but it came as a shock to me to find that she’d outlived him.

My wife’s phone rings constantly, but never when she is able to answer it. The pattern is invariable:
1. Me: ‘Your phone is ringing.’
2. Wife: no reply.
3. Attempt to find location of missing wife’s missing phone knowing only that it is never where I found it last time.
4. Answer phone.
5. ‘Yes, I am Mr McQueen. Yes, you can speak to Mrs McQueen… if I can find her.’
6. Find missing wife who is never where she was last time I found her.
7. Await further instructions.
8. On completion of phone call carry out ‘Two-minute job’ for wife as instructed.
9. Return to previous task-in-hand forty five minutes later to find stiffened brush locked to side of paint pot and paint drip on wall that would look more at home in the Carlsbad Caverns.
10. Phone rings.
11. Me: ‘Your phone is ringing.’
12. Wife: no reply…

I do not need to say ‘Open Sesame’ to open my garage door (although I do need to find the missing key) but it is rather like I imagine Ali Baba’s cave would have been if the forty thieves had collected shit. It has a place for everything, in which I find everything else. If ever I ask where something is, my wife will answer ‘In the garage’ and I know that I will never find it. A four hour search in there would be more likely to turn up David Livingstone than whatever it is I need. Amazingly it does not appear to have mice: I think that they are being eaten by Japanese soldiers who are unaware that the war is over.

…And being male and old… and alive I now find myself with the most persistent interrupter of all: the over-inflated prostate gland. Want to enjoy a meal, a film, an uninterrupted night’s sleep? Well, in that case you have, it would appear, three options: impotency, incontinence or womanhood. And don’t get me wrong here, I’m not trying to claim that life is a bed of roses for women wee-wee wise – I know that I have never had to squeeze a mini human being through my nunny – it’s just that women don’t find themselves peeing on their own slippers anything like so often. I myself have spent longer staring at the urinal wall whilst people either side of me came and went in watery relief than I would care to mention. Nervous Bladder I used to think: the inability to pee in close proximity to other urinating men, but I now realise that it is down to the eccentricity of this normally walnut-sized gland, which is now approaching that of a belligerent watermelon. In truth, most of the time I barely notice that it is there – except when it is inconvenient for it to be so. Half way through a meal, a concert, a film or, most annoying of all, two minutes after my last toilet visit. Most testingly the prostate likes to do half a job before reminding me forcefully that it is now in urgent need of finishing what it so reluctantly started just two minutes earlier.

The only blessing – if I’m honest, I actually have many, but let us say for now that it is singular – is my unmatched ability to distract myself. I am almost permanently distracted. My brain is so seldom engaged in the same task as my body that they are virtual strangers. Actual physical distractions serve only to bring me back to a place that I should have been in the first instance and, in the great scheme of things, ensure that, eventually, I get back on with the stuff I was meant to be getting on with and that – providing it doesn’t disturb me – can only be a good thing…

Squirrels

I am fully aware as I start to write today’s little potage de vie, that I will lose about 50% of my readership by the mid-way point. I remember my dad telling me a similar tale and I had to beg him to stop. (He didn’t, of course, but that’s just the way it is with dads.) Although I know that the way I tell my little ‘stories’ often has a tendency to make things sound as if I have just made them up on the back of a particularly lurid acid trip, it is not the case – particularly so today. The story I am about to relate is not only completely true, but relates back to a very old thread within this blog and whilst I cannot honestly claim that I have not embellished the facts in my own style – there is no point in putting profiteroles on the table if you can’t cover them in cream and sprinkles – they do, none-the-less remain ‘the truth’: buffed up perhaps, but not made up.

It is the time of year when the squirrels in the local park will take food from your hands and, should you not be quite quick enough in offering it to them, will think nothing of running up your leg and nipping your fingers by way of a reminder. Food is at a premium and when it is available, they will do all that they can to get it and to hang on to it. The sun was shining, the grandkids were happy and we were all enjoying our commune with sciurus nature when my phone rang. Following on from my recent ultrasound scan (see ‘Mortal’ here) I had an appointment later that very afternoon to see a specialist at the hospital which had been rescheduled from a later date just the previous day, bringing it forward by forty-eight hours, and so, knowing the difficulties under which the health service is currently operating, I presumed they were calling me to postpone and reschedule out little chat in favour of a more convenient time – say sometime in 2025. I was consequently happily surprised when the voice said “We have a cancellation. Can you make it to the hospital for 2pm?” It was noon. I said “yes”, happy that I would be seen early and anticipating that my treatment, whatever it might be, would be thus expedited, e.g. pushed to the front of the queue.

At 2pm sharp I rocked up at the relevant department and was immediately ushered through to a small side room by a very pleasant uniformed nurse who sat me down and started to write down my details. All I remember thinking at this stage was that she didn’t look like a consultant. However, she put me at ease whilst cheerfully jotting down my answers, even laughing when she had to start again because of my inability to answer a simple question with anything approaching the right answer, and then quite out of the blue she asked me, “Have you ever had this procedure before?” A little bell tinkled somewhere in the depths of my poor brain but, if cogs had begun to whirr at all, they were connected to nothing that in anyway helped me to process what she had just asked.
“Procedure?” I queried.
“Yes, procedure.”
“I didn’t know that I was having a procedure.”
“Oh yes,” she said, “you’re having a procedure.”
“What kind of procedure?” I was aware that my voice had now lost all of its affected carefree tone. There was a definite hint of strangled cat.
She sighed quietly and returned to her note-making. “We’ll talk about it when I’ve finished the paperwork,” she said…

Now, I am not the kind of person who carries a medical dictionary between the ears, but the words ‘flexible cystoscopy’ managed to paint the kind of picture that it is hard to ignore. I tried to explain that I had not come prepared for a ‘procedure’; that my wife was waiting for me outside and that I hadn’t discussed with anyone the need for it, but she smiled reassuringly and said, “We need to check for cancer. And anyway, you’re next. It will only take twenty minutes.” All reasoned argument had departed: she had me at ‘cancer’. She led me through to a little room occupied by two female nurses and a male doctor*. I was instructed to “remove everything below the waist. Put the gown on, but do not fasten it, and then put your shoes and socks back on.” I saw how absurd I appeared. How much did I really want to look like a complete berk whilst walking into what I now realised was to come? “We don’t want you getting cold feet,” said the nurse.
“Believe me, I’ve already got ‘em.”

Of the actual ‘mechanics’ of what followed I can say little except that both of my ‘below stairs’ exits were used as entries – and I am not a fan. The two nurses – who were exactly everything that a nurse should be – kept up a barrage of pleasant smalltalk, obviously designed to distract me from the awfulness of what was occurring, and it very nearly worked, but let’s be honest, you know that when a doctor says “This is going to sting,” it is never actually going to be better than expected. Watching a high resolution television picture of your own interior probably has the edge on Eastenders, but little else. I can only tell you that when, having finished what he was doing, the doctor said “Turn onto your side and pull your knees up to your chest,” it actually came as a relief.

I am immensely relieved to be able to report that whatever it was they hoped not to find, they duly did not find it and so discharged me from their care with the knowledge that there was no cancer, but that I would experience ‘some discomfort’ when urinating for a couple of days. In fact the knowledge of the former just about made peeing nitric acid for the next forty-eight hours tolerable.

When I got home I read and re-read my letter but could find no pre-warning of the ‘procedure’ they had scheduled and I am left thinking that the whole thing – including the shifting timescale of the appointment – was just a very clever subterfuge to prevent me, the patient, from getting too nervous about what was to come because, if I’m honest, had I known what lay ahead, I might well have found myself at one with the squirrels: grasping everything in the vicinity of my nuts in both little paws and steadfastly refusing to let go.

*I am uncertain of the etiquette involved here. He may have been a ‘Mr’ rather than ‘Dr’, but whichever he was, in view of what he then did, I certainly hope that he held some form of medical qualification.

N.B. This post is merely a short record of my own naivety and is in no way intended as any criticism of the care I received, nor the people who delivered it. Both were absolutely exemplary. Thank you N.H.S!

Mortal

I have written before about my on-going battle with a prostate that the specialist described as ‘a beast’. (It was actually the subject of a very early post – here – and part of the reason I started this whole little miscellanea.) For the vast majority of the time it does not impact negatively on my life at all: it just sits there, quietly biding its time until it decides that the moment is right to sit up and shout ‘Don’t forget me. I’m here!’ It is the reason, however, that when I’m out and about I seldom walk past a public toilet without paying a ‘just in case’ visit, as I am acutely aware that if I don’t it might just bang its drum before I get to the next one. It’s ok. I take medication that appears to have no effect at all, until I forget to take it. I’m completely fine almost all of the time, but I cannot support a full bladder. If ever I am faced with a full bladder – can I actually ever claim to be faced with a full bladder, particularly my own? – I would be forced to accept one of the two options available to me in such a circumstance: a) be unable to find a public lavatory and widdle down the first available tree or b) find a public lavatory and find that I no longer seem to need it. I’m not overly keen on either alternative, so maintaining some vacant capacity in the system is by far the most sensible option available to me.

As I now have a new associated ‘issue’, linked to ‘the beast’, I have been summoned to the hospital for tests. These tests rely upon me having a really full bladder and – most pertinently – ‘May be subject to considerable delay’, which means that I, once again, am faced with two options: a) attend with a full bladder that will have to be emptied with undue haste if I am over thirty seconds late in being called¹ or b) attend with a bottle of water and an empty bladder that will still have to be emptied seconds after I have emptied the bottle. I cannot do what they need me to do in order to test me, as that is why they have to test me in the first place.

I should state, here and now, that in reality I am fine. 99.9% of the time I have no problems of any kind other than those that would have to be described as ‘age related’: I ache; I moan; I spend half of my life lamenting that ‘fings ain’t wot they used to be’; my arches could not fall any further without somebody being there to raise the rest of my foot; my gums could not receded further without coming out of my nose; my nasal hair could not get longer without requiring a fringe. My jowls have jowls, my chins have chins. My teeth have developed a disturbing tendency to look like teak in certain lights. I must use my own weight in tooth-whitening gunk if I am not to look like a betel-chewing heroin addict who drinks wood dye for kicks. And I know, I realise, that all of the above (and many, many more) are the natural consequences of growing old which, as the tag-line for this little blog of mine suggests, is far preferable to the possibility of not doing so. None-the-less, it doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t prefer a life without them. I understand when people say that growing old is a privilege. For other people it probably is. For most of us it is shit. The realisation that everything you are is not quite what once it was, is not a comforting one. The knowledge that it can only get worse, even less so. Half deaf, half blind, half incontinent and half-witted… Oh, hang on.

So, I ask myself, ‘What is there left to look forward to?’ and the answer is ‘Everything’, because whatever it is, it is all that there is and that is the point at which I begin to find joy in almost everything I do. OK, there’s not much joy to be had in ramming my hand down the ‘U-bend’, but there is satisfaction to be found in the gurgling sound that announces the dispersal of the whatever-it-was – don’t even dare to think about it – that was blocking it in the first place. There is no fun to be found in D.I.Y – some people claim that there is, but they are clinically insane – but there is pride to be found in a shelf that can bear weight without falling from the wall and decapitating the cat. There is little satisfaction in tidying up the house after the grandkids have gone home, but there is delight in making the mess with them in the first place. I am fortunate, I don’t need to work these days, and consequently I find that I enjoy almost every minute of it. I have deliberately eschewed as much pressure as I am able and I am – even for myself – better company for it. Even with a full bladder…

I probably ought to point out here that I do not, in reality, have incontinence issues. My problem arises only if I make the stupid mistake of thinking about it – e.g. the simple query ‘Where’s the nearest public lavatory’ accompanied with the certain knowledge that it is a decent car journey away – when the threat of it hangs over me like an unfortunately apposite wet blanket.

¹This, by the way, is most definitely a mental thing. If my mind is otherwise occupied, I can go for days. If, however, I deliberately try to occupy my mind, it merely serves to remind me of why I am trying to distract myself and the panic kicks in. If you have any suggestions that do not involve ‘growing up’, I would be very happy to hear them.

I probably will not use this post as my profile for on-line dating sites.

Spend a Penny, Make a Million

urinals — Photo by Syed Umer on Unsplash

You know the way it is. You never want the loo, until you need the loo. You never really need to find the public conveniences until you are in the middle of a strange town centre with no obvious indication whatsoever of where they might be. You are never quite so desperate as when the key is stuck in the lock and the next-door neighbour has door-stepped you in order to complain about the state of your over-hanging hedge. It is difficult to explain to anyone who has never felt such unease, the instant discomfort you feel when you glimpse the motorway sign that says it is thirty miles to the next services. You were fine until that very second. It’s like being a child again – although the promise of a lolly does not make the feeling go away. It becomes a mental battle which, when your ammunition is as limited as my own, you are destined to lose. Distraction is probably the way to go – except that it is almost impossible to think about anything else when you are concentrating on listing the five hundred most obvious reasons why you do not need a wee.

Now, I don’t want you thinking that this little functional peccadillo dominates my life. It does not. In truth it is barely a feature, except when it is inconvenient for it to be so. I do not spend my whole life obsessing about toilets. I do not live in a widdle-centric bubble of my own making. It is an almost entirely mental thing. I want to use ‘the bathroom’ almost always when there is not one to be used. It emerges as a problem only very rarely and then only when it is entirely inopportune for it to do so. Give me a day on the beach playing ball with the kids and periodically sluicing the dribbled ice cream from them with sea water – no problem. Put me on a bus, stuck between stops – different story.

We have, I know, covered this ground before and I guess that you are now thinking, ‘Why is the soft old buffer discussing this again? Is his life so bereft of tales to tell that he has to fall back on his waterworks twice a year?’ Well, the answer is recycling; not of ideas, but of bottles. I am rigidly adherent to all the protocols. However I can contribute, I try to do so. The big ecological push at the moment is for reusable drinks bottles. As the current advice is (I believe) to drink at least thirty gallons of water a day and the current fashion is never to be seen without a water bottle in hand, then the ‘green’ thing to do is to stop buying single-use bottles of variously mineralised volcanic waters and to carry instead a sturdy receptacle that you can repeatedly refill at any other water rate payer’s expense. As I look down the High Street now, it appears that everybody is carrying such a flask in hand, bag or specially designed belt holster and – I know you are ahead of me: although small in number, mine is a discerning and educated readership – perhaps what I see is my fortune lying ahead of me. Perhaps this is my Dragons’ Den moment because I have just seen a vision of people of my age carrying an empty bottle everywhere they go, perhaps in a brown paper bag, in the certain knowledge that simply by carrying something that could – behind a convenient wall, tree or spouse – be used in an emergency, there will never be such an emergency. You know the way it is…

I don’t need you to remind me of my age, I have a bladder to do that for me – Stephen Fry