'Hey, Harriet! Mamma mia, you're getting a lot of attention. You're unforgettable. You made an impression."
You take your kicks where you can get them, right? It hasn’t been a good week. I have been the “eeze” in squeezed. I have been inside so many waiting rooms in the past seven days, read so many dog-eared back issues of faded magazines, imploring me to embrace last season’s pastel-coloured culottes, or welcome the spring in a buttercup-yellow playsuit, or kickstart my Christmas diet with a colonic irrigation, that I could weep.
I probably have wept, slumped over in some plastic hospital chair waiting for news, marooned under a jazzy poster for bowel screening, featuring some benign-looking 60-year-old sitting in a bunch of heather in a Fair Isle sweater. Not my experience of my good friend the colonoscopy tube, but there you go. Prevention is better than cure, they like to sing, when you’re lying on your side staring at a bluish computer screen that is about to run a movie of your insides for the delight of the face-masked, rubber-aproned audience.
But I digress. I didn’t figure too personally in this week’s health traumas. I was just the driver.
To cut a long and tedious story short, the three people I live with have all been hit with various respiratory illnesses. These have been fairly contained, requiring nothing more than a dash to the nearest nebuliser machine, a reminder to teenagers to pop their penicillin or get into or out of bed, and efforts to remember to blow out the tea light under the tea-tree burner before falling into bed with my make-up on. So far, so pedestrian.
Shag-all to complain about
I constantly remind myself of my good luck in these situations. I have shag-all to complain about. I drive my family saloon to the surgery, tootle around in the pharmacy debating the efficacy of pretty little flower remedies, buy myself a takeaway coffee and have a catnap in the supermarket car park. Illness of that nature, when you can afford the prescription fee, is reduced to a minor inconvenience. Like I say, I count my lucky first-world stars.
In the midst of the hack’n’wheeze, the bark’n’whoop, my mother got ill. I was driving at the time; she was in the passenger seat. I counted her breaths, kept driving. “I’ve never felt like this before,” she said when I’d managed to find a wheelchair and get her inside the hospital. Her face was the colour of uncooked pastry. She was admitted to the cardiac ward. She was lucky: a bed was found, she bypassed the trolley park.
Pyjama duty
I had to go and buy her pyjamas and bedsocks. It had been a long day. I saw a woman I vaguely recognised as myself halted in the long mirror in the ugly store. Bathed in the juice of a fluorescent tube, she looked old and tired. She looked like a bad actor in a failing sitcom: far too much eyeliner, far too little sleep, lousy dialogue.
“Do you have pyjamas with sleeves?” I asked the lady who was stacking the shelves with Day-Glo crop-tops.
“Sleeves?” she asked, looking dubious.
“Sleeves would be good, on pyjamas that don’t have the words ‘Gee, I’m hot in the morning’ emblazoned across the chest. Actually, do you have pyjamas with sleeves and buttons?”
“Buttons?” she repeated. “Sleeves and buttons?”
I might have been asking for an eclipsing moon.
She was a nice woman. I bought more bedsocks than I needed, went elsewhere.
When I got home there was an email in my junk box addressed to a woman called Harriet. Usually, I just hit the delete button.
“Hey, Harriet! You’re unforgettable. You made an impression.”
I don’t know who Harriet is. She’s from Idaho and she went to school with some people called Bo and Cheryl and Betsy and Tami, and the email invited me, I mean Harriet, to reconnect with all those guys, many of whom have posted before-and-after photographs of themselves on the website Friends Reunited. And I don’t mean to be harsh, Harriet, when I say that your chums aren’t the athletic, summery folk they used to be in nineteen-seventy-suntan.
But at this stage of the game they’ve probably done a lot of driving to emergency rooms, a lot of sitting up with sick children, a lot of trying to find disabled parking space for their elderly, anxious parents, a lot of falling between the sheets with their mascara on.
And yet there is something poignant about their open, candid faces, Harriet, don’t you think? Whoever you are.
That’s life, Harriet, eh? That’s just the way the great big calorific cookie crumbles.