Cold front

Everyone is ill. What a lousy time of year this is. Committed Christians look away now, but I’m beginning to think the only reason Christmas was invented was to plonk some sort of festive highpoint in amongst what is otherwise a vast stretch of dreariness and shoddy health and unbelievably cold days.

After Dylan’s night in hospital, we are back to normal, only both boys are tired. Before I had children I mistakenly thought they had boundless energy, but the five-day-a-week school routine takes care to grind that out of them. They have dry lips, dark shadows under their eyes and are permanently cadging for days off.

Other friends have colds that won’t shift and aggressive viruses that won’t back off and one batch of mates have had something I’ve never even heard of, possibly relating to their sinuses, but it laid both of them out. It ended in ‘itis’, which is never good.

Perhaps we just need to accept that we are fallible. Just because we don’t get polio or tetanus anymore, we sort of assume that we shouldn’t get colds and persistent bugs. And who has the time, frankly. Illness happens to older people, right? Well I went for a drink the other night with a great old friend who is going deaf and we chatted about that and then we chatted about me having cancer and the odds of it coming back and despite all this had a merry old evening. But neither of us is 40 yet. Bad health, from cancer to the common cold, is no respector of age or fairness, it seems.

Well hello?

Chatty cashiers. Good or bad? I used to think bad. All that false cheeriness and rubbish about the weather while you’re desperately trying to ram a conveyor-belt’s-worth of pasta and onions and muesli bars into a floppy carrier bag.

But then today, in Sainsbury’s, my cashier didn’t even say hello. Didn’t ask how many bags I’d used. Barely made eye contact. She wasn’t rude, just detached. Good for her, really. Best way to cope with a six-hour shift on the checkout at Sainsbury’s. But I felt a bit short-changed, as it were. I think I will appreciate the chatty cashier in future. I suggest you do likewise.

I’ll go to bed at 4am

I pulled an all nighter on Wednesday night. Wayhey! I was up at A&E with my asthmatic son. Booo. This kind of all nighter involves no drinking or revelry, just a marathon of waiting followed by more waiting. If it had been a painting, it would have been entitled Still Life With Strip Lighting and Stethoscopes. Sadly, it was more like Carry On Up The Children’s Assessment Unit than fine art.

By 2.30 am, after waiting three hours in A&E to be transported up to the Children’s Unit, only to be dumped in a waiting room (strip lighting on full, of course), I did rather lose my cool with a nurse, those posters reminding patients that Abuse of NHS Staff Must Stop seeming to loom out of the walls at me. We got to bed at 4am and were up again at 7.30. It’s best to get up early when you’ve got lots more waiting around to do, I find. Dylan requested toast for his breakfast and was brought just that. Two slices of white with one pack of butter and no drink. He was ill for God’s sake and had had nothing except a few sips of water since about 11pm. It’s all so counter-intuative, the way you have to fight for basic support, like a bed, rather than a waiting-room chair, and a drink, rather than no drink at all. There’s something so bloody unnurturing about hospitals.  The individuals who work in them can be amazing, but the system seems to be, for want of a better word, buggered.

Oh well. He’s better, that’s the main thing. And in the tradition of ‘big nights’ we both went to bed, together, at 8pm last night.

He saw their faces, now he’s a believer…

Husband is considering a career change. Publishing is a cruel mistress and he’s thinking about doing something more social and meaningful. Of course, all those kinds of jobs are about to be slashed, but no matter. He is ready to ‘give back’. Which lead to last night’s exchange. While discussing his future, he pulled up a page on his laptop showcasing the work of a local housing trust.

‘Look at this,’ he said very eagerly, bouncing a bit in his seat. I declined, feeling petish.

‘Just come here and look at this, will you,’ he urged.

‘I don’t want to,’ I sulked (career change conversations bring out the absolute worse in me).

‘Look at this, right now, come over here and look at this.’

I can see from where I’m standing that it’s just a web page, of no particular merit. But I go over and look.

There is a picture of a row of people, smiling, at the top of the page.

‘I could be one of these people,’ he says, eyes aflame, indicating the photograph. ‘In a few years time, I could be one of these people.’

It was almost like Dr King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech – full of hope and possibility. The row of people, smiling. The tingling sense of excitement that one day, he too could join their optimistic ranks. Job requirements and salary and hours are not the point. The point is, one day, he could be one of those people.

If you don’t ask…

I have begun to draft my Christmas list. This is square, I know. Or at best childish. Actually, it’s just that if I don’t write a list at all, I’ll be getting all sorts of bizarre horror from the garden centres and pottery outlets of the South. And if I don’t write a list now, right now in early November, I’ll definitely be getting some unscheduled hokum, as certain members of my family treat Christmas shopping like a military operation to be carried out with stealth and speed at least six weeks prior to the date. Nothing like getting into the Christmas spirit, eh?
On my list are: a trowel, a flask (vacuum, not hip), slippers and a tea cosy. It reads like the ‘what to pack’ list of a pensioner from Worthing about to set off on a particularly long coach trip. But I don’t care. I suppose I’d love some beautiful shoes and a fantastic necklace and a thoughtful selection of expensive treaty beauty products. But Christmas isn’t about treats, it’s about practicality. What you can ask for, what you can expect and what is guaranteed to work out. So although I’ve also chucked in a few suggestions from the Toast catalogue, I know what I’ll get, and it’ll be a trowel, a flask (vacuum, not hip), slippers and a tea cosy. But you can’t say I didn’t ask.

Take it to the bridge

Jay and I are recently returned from our first dalliance with the ‘literary circuit’ to (belatedly) promote our Aargh to Zzzz of Parenting. I use the terms literary and circuit in the loosest possible a way. To Hebden Bridge, then, to take part in the Calderdale readers and writers festival. We are the writers and we also did the reading to what can only be described as a modest turn out (six people if you include the library staff, and I do include the library staff).  There was a muddle over the timings (it said 2pm on the poster, 7pm on the fliers) and no books had arrived for us to sell (but then again, no punters had arrived to purchase them, either, so whatever). After half an hour of us nervously sipping warm white wine and waiting for the audience to arrive (it didn’t), we speed read our way through a handful of entries before fleeing to the nearby pub.

Still, those that did turn out enjoyed it and at the end the organiser commented that it was a shame more people hadn’t come as there were lots of parents in the town who would have enjoyed it – if only they weren’t busy, at 7pm just as we kicked off, putting their kids to bed. Hmmm. On the plus side, though, it was a night away and you can get two for one scampi and chips at the pub behind the library for £6 on a Tuesday.