History Boys

15/5/11

Before Easter I was chatting to the editor of the quarterly magazine which now very kindly gives me work, and he mentioned interviewing the UK’s ten top historians, Schama, Fergusson, etc. and finding out who they dine with, go shooting with at weekends, advice given to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown etc.

It sounded like a great idea and I wished him well. Then he said that I was doing it.

I set about it immediately, before the shock had set in – real hard work for a change, all those phone numbers to find, most of them abroad as that last generation of grammar school boys provided a round the world history service.

The whole country was about to pack up for Easter followed by the Royal Wedding but I beavered away feeling the way I imagine Kenneth Branagh behaved when he was trying to rustle up a cast for his Hamlet: “Who is it? Oh – Darling we’ve got Jack Lemmon! Oh Derek you sweetheart! Darling, we’ve got Jacobi! And so on collecting them all up; Julie, Katy and that old fellow who used to be in sitcoms as Polonius.

I got most of my history stars before the hiatus of the wedding and the bank hols.

“Your magazine is exactly our target audience here at the Royal Palaces,” said Lucy Worsley winsomely, but they were a tricky bunch. I had to establish a time and call them. One young buck who'd once been on TV spouting about castles was out when I called and when I spoke to him a day later he gave no apology or explanation. Another provided a time to call him at home in New England but when I rang no one answered. When I tried again the next day his wife said vaguely that she thought he was at a party and he had not been able to speak to me the night before because he was in the basement doing the laundry and couldn’t hear the phone.

David Cadwardine got back to me after a party. Alcohol can be the interviewer’s best friend, but not in that case. He was so maudlin and self-deprecating, saying he had no influence over anyone, that he really had nothing much to say. Lord Hennessey of the mysterious, erotic sounding Nympsfield, was also unsure that anyone listened to him.

No word from the Scots lothario Niall Ferguson, but then he never used to speak to me even when I was working for his wife.

There was soon only one person left – Simon Schama that cerebral, writhing, fevered exponent of world history, so passionate and mighty that he can even get away with using long words and winding sentences on TV.

Before Easter hit, I left messages with his publisher, or tried to. I got through to the voice mails of girls with names like Suzanna, Savannah and India, who’d never heard of him. When I was put through to the correct double-barrelled name she had already slipped away for the break.

After the holiday with my deadline only a day away, I got a date and time fixed to call the great man but he would only do it if I read his views on education on line, and a salient chapter in his new book, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble. The publisher didn’t know which chapter that was.

I rushed off to Waterstone’s and bought the book, only out in hardback, got back and started trying to read as much of it as possible before he called the next day at 3pm our time.

I sat at my desk, reading possibly relevant chapters, not sure what he would ask me, making notes, going through my questions, waiting until the appointed moment, but he was not in.

The next day no reason was given for this silence, perhaps he was doing his laundry or out at a party. The publisher made another date for me. She thawed out a little as if we were both now up against it. I waited at the appointed time, sitting there like a love-lorn fool, but heard my phone ringing off the hook as they say in rom-coms.

On Friday 13^th I went off out for the day to collect some of my paintings from my friend Charles in East Finchley, which is a lovely looking place if you live in Acton.

The date lived up to its reputation as when I got home I’d got a parking ticket, having forgotten to display my new and costly parking permit. There was also a message waiting from the publisher with the double-barrel name, saying Schama would talk to me at 4pm.

It was 5.30pm and she left no number for herself or him. I scrambled to find her in my note-book again and she gave me a number for Schama in New York. I rang but it didn’t work. I tried it again, mixed the code around a bit, tried 118, but no use. Just caught the publisher before she went off and she promised to get me another number. She also suggested I should apologise to him for not being in when I was supposed to be.

“Yes, apologise Jane, apologise, do it!” said my editor, sounding more like an editor than he normally does. He's usually very pleasant.

I had a flash of perception about the publishing world, where if you are in that extremely rare position of making money with your books you cannot be in the wrong, a bit like an old Hollywood star or even royalty.

As I waited again, I wondered how you talk to the most interesting man on earth? At last I heard that silky, careful, almost whispered voice. I’d been to the Jan Gossaert exhibition at the National Gallery, and I hoped he’d be interested in that. He was.

There was an exquisite little sculpture in the show called the Spinario, of a boy taking a thorn out of his foot. This slightly erotic image was immensely popular in the early modern period, the Pope and later Charles I commissioned them. I'd never seen it before and mentioned it to him. There was a moment of silence – had I by chance found the one thing in the world unknown to the maestro?

After this tiny lull the conversation cracked on well, I even got a possible diary story. I also mentioned the arguments I had heard against history as a subject. The line is that it’s all propaganda written by the victors in battle, and there are no real facts. Also that the facts we once used are redundant as they only apply to an extinct patriarchy. I was surprised when he said he hadn’t heard those views very much.

“That argument has been kept from me,” he said, as if it was of no consequence.

I got an impression about his world too, that it’s a comfortable place where left wing views do not form the main opinion. Lucky he – when I was in university and recently in FE and working in prison I was surrounded by teachers who hated history as a subject and were suspicious of knowledge itself.

The following week I had lunch with some of my former Fleet Street colleagues to try to catch up on the latest round of gossip i.e. sackings and whose got work and who hasn’t.

Of course one of them knows someone who slept with Schama when they were young. Apparently he was really interesting in that department too.

collywobbles

26/5/11

Collywobbles a bit today; just had a lovely trip to Poland to see such good friends, enjoyable day out today to London Zoo to the opening of the new Penguin beach enclosure, but there was slight fear there; was it because of the magpie on the path, a slight stomach ache which could be something I ate, or a young person's death mentioned in the paper?
Got home and lay in bed for awhile thinking how "it" could just happen at any time.

Neasden

Tuesday 17^th May.

I’ve never been clear about what I’m getting. Way back when this thing began I got a lot of letters from Acton JobCentre Plus, or were they? There was an address in Glasgow. Some how I got onto the disability benefits list, I think, and was told I was entitled to £40 a month or so. I didn’t bother with that, then there were more letters, some saying I was not entitled to anything, as if I was arguing, which I wasn’t.

My doctor took charge of it all and got me to sign a letter with him. Since then I have been receiving a small amount of monthly money. I put it towards the high cost of Matcha Green Tea and the magical Montmorency cherry juice.

Then I got a letter saying I had to be assessed to make sure I am not defrauding the taxpayer by dossing around when I could be out there partaking in one of the millions of exciting jobs available.

This troubled me a bit. I lost my job at the Daily Mail in September 2005, and spent the next five years sitting at my computer filling in forms on line for jobs and getting no reply. I didn’t get enough freelance work to live on either, and eventually I started going for the “small” jobs; shop work, stacking shelves, a local café, book shop, Waterstones, museum guide, the Acton Care-Centre, doctor’s receptionist. I didn’t get a thing.

It became clear that there were no jobs for white middle class, middle aged ladies like me. The woman who interviewed me at the care home was embarrassed. She said she mainly employed Africans who sent money home to their families. She wanted strapping young things who could work a twelve hour shift for shit wages.

At forty eight I was an embarrassing bit of scrap on the heap, apparently un-usable by this society. Forty eight sounds old, I know, but I wasn’t. I was still ready to test my fate, take a chance, but I didn’t get one.

The trauma of that with its wrenching shift of identity and life-style was almost as bad as the diagnosis of cancer – I would rank them almost side by side. Perhaps that is why my mind gets so cloudy when the matter of “Jobseekers” and benefits comes up.

“You should get this money,” said my Doctor. “You have ovarian cancer.” I didn’t want to hear that, but I decided to go through with it.

This assessment seemed even more unlikely because it involved a trip to Neasden of all places, with an order to be there at 9am or there would be a danger of losing benefits. As if this north London suburb is known to be inaccessible and largely unvisited by outsiders, they provided a map and even a timed journey plan from my flat.

I got up at 6am as I had no way of knowing how long the journey to Neasden might take. I got there at 7.30am and followed the map along a dual carriage way, under a dirty bridge to a large flat building called something “house,” as much like a house as an air-craft hangar.

I had decided to put on a summer dress, bought on Saturday from Dorothy Perkins in the Westfield Centre, along with a white cotton bolero. Lord I was freezing. I hadn’t worn a dress for ages and I badly misjudged the Spring weather. Despite costing £40 it’s made of mighty thin cotton, almost like tracing paper, and it kept blowing up around my neck.

Some Somali men on the desk of the office next door to the medical centre let me sit in and wait. The medical centre still hadn’t opened at 8.45am. I stood on the step in the wind, joined by a middle aged woman with a pony-tail, and a walking stick.

“Be careful,” she said, “they are watching us. There is one of them in that four-wheel drive over there. They watch to see if you are really disabled.”

I flexed my hand with carpel-tunnel syndrome a bit to try to look a bit less of a ligger, whilst screwing my fly-away skirt down between my perishing knees.

She said she was by profession “a dog psychologist.” She hadn’t had much luck with her clients.

“I was in the park with my Shepherd,” she went on. “Another dog barged up to us and completely severed my leg.”

I smiled politely as if perfectly convinced. I wondered what kind of dog it could have been, probably not one of the myriad Yorkshire terriers or pugs in smart coats that you see in Acton Park. And why couldn’t she carry on with that work - surely all she needed to do was sit opposite or behind the disturbed dog as it lay on the couch.

“I now wear a brace,” she said. How could you put a brace on a leg that was no longer there?

“My physiotherapist says I won’t be well again for seven years.”

The letter was very keen on us being there by 9am but they only opened the door one minute before the hour.

A young Somali man with a shiny forehead and tiny features unlocked it as I pressed the bell. He looked annoyed and began to question me about why I had done that as he was unlocking. He seemed like an offended policeman who might at any moment turn proper nasty. The dog lady and I hopped into the lift with remarkable alacrity for two such disabled people.

“Well, you are here nice and early,” said the Chinese girl on the second floor desk, as if we were not only disabled but only five years old.

There were just the two of us being interviewed and I was relieved to be called very quickly.

The woman interviewing was a nurse of the old type; English, well educated and pleasant. Unlike the other staff I’d met she was impeccably professional. As far as I could tell she had no attitude towards me at all. She just wrote it all down and some one else made the decision.

She tapped away, and I noticed she had no wrist supports on the desk or key board at all. As I listed my rather vague symptoms, I wondered how long her wrists would keep going like that.

I asked her if she knew how much I was getting, she didn’t but thought it might be about £64 a week. I was very surprised. I’d never noticed that on my bank statement. I’d feel rich if I had that.

We did some exercises - swing the arms, open and shut hands, pronate and supinate the forearms. Lie down and sit up. Touch the toes. I was very good at them, except when she told me to put my chin on my chest and look at the ceiling. She tapped me for reflexes. It was no more humiliating that meeting people who didn’t know me or can’t remember me when I had a job, Egyptian cotton sheets and good clothing.

On the way out, heading to the loo, I saw the Somali who’d let us in, sitting facing the ladies lavatory door. As I went in he gave me an unpleasant, knowing look as if I’d got scammer written all over me. Perhaps the dog lady was right and we were being scrutinised. He and the girl on the desk regarded us as if they had private knowledge about us and it wasn’t anything to be proud of.

I wondered whether to ask them how they got their jobs – and if they could possibly get one for me ?

Honeymoon

4/5/11

I suppose I am having a kind of honeymoon with myself – all this lovely weather, and the lovely name NED playing in my head - “no evidence of disease.” I am on a spree.

Yesterday I went to a service at St Martin’s in Ealing at 8am. There is a desire to give praise and thanks, and the memory of all the people I’ve met who are still suffering.

The church was locked and I began to wonder if it had been cancelled or Fr. Bill had overslept. At the vicarage there was no sign of life.

He appeared at one minute to, holding a heavy bunch of keys, which always seem symbolic of something; St. Peter, one of my former cat sitters who used to visit twenty cats a day, old fashioned gaolers.

The Lady Chapel, although being a low church they don’t call it that, was flooded with golden light. I was asked to read the Gospel which surprised me, as at my other church this is the preserve of the priest. Fr Bill gave me a short homily about what he calls, “democracy.”

I haven’t read anything out loud since I was about thirteen. In my early days at school I was regularly called on to read and relished it, then my confidence evaporated and I started to develop phobias, about all sorts of things, and that was one of them.

There were only four of us there but still the words started swimming before my eyes. I managed it OK though and it was a good chance to try it again.

Spent the day struggling with a piece I am writing about the UK’s ten most influential historians. I have six so far, David Starkey and Lucy Worsley gave me some brilliant quotes, the others are in the US and more difficult to reach.

In the evening I walked through Acton Park to the Rocket pub for a life-drawing class. I used to go to this class two winters ago now and was very friendly with some of the group including an Australian doctor who was involved, sadly, in vivisection.

He was giving me a lift home one night, after I’d had the diagnosis of cancer. He said, “It’s only a Stage 1, you’ll be OK.” I told him it was stage 4. He said, “Oh,” sounding really shocked, taken aback. I remember his bulging, glaucous eyes in the car mirror, their look of fear, as if I was as good as dead. I haven’t seen or heard anything of him since that night.

The class is now in a different pub with different people, apart from one elderly lady. She was surprised at how much I’d changed and wondered if I’d had my hair done like this deliberately. A lot of older people seem to like this bubble cut, it must remind them of something from long ago.

It was a good feeling to get to the class again, like a renewed strength. But I realise that I am not ambitious anymore, for my art, writing or anything, all that has gone.

The model was an exquisite Chinese girl, with perfect proportions, not an ounce of fat under her skin which was smooth as marble.

An elderly man in the group, who must once have been handsome, chatted her up relentlessly during the break telling her all about his former career with an oil company. He’d ordered a beef burger and chips but hardly had time from looking at her to eat it. I removed nearly all the chips. Being invisible can have its advantages.

Today, struggling on with the history men, and girls. trying to pin down Simon Schama. Before Easter I approached Columbia University, and publishers in the UK. They didn’t return my calls and today neither India nor Sophie, the plummy voiced gels in their publicity offices, had ever heard of him. I had to spell out his name v-e-r-y carefully.

While I was waiting for someone, anyone to call back, made some Yorkshire parkin for the first time. It seems to be a butch northern kind of gingerbread, for people who disapprove of the pleasure of cake.

Royal Wedding day.

Friday 29^th April. Royal Wedding Day.

I don’t know how the bride was doing but I was getting frazzled trying to get people to come round and watch the Royal Wedding with me.

My friend June in Guildford said she was scared of transport problems in London. “I’m not interested in these English things,” said Kayoko, my Japanese friend.

Another Japanese friend said she couldn’t come because she is addicted to a Korean soap opera.

“I can’t ask the children to travel all that way by car just to watch TV,” said another and my friend Pam had a cold.

I felt gloomy thinking of watching it on my own, then I began to picture them all arriving just as the bride got to the abbey, needing help to park their cars, demanding tea while she was taking her vows. I regretted ever suggesting it. It also dawned on me that perhaps I shouldn’t have invited anyone as my TV screen is only 13 inches wide.

My mother, aged 88, far away in her Staffordshire village said she preferred to watch it alone, then both her neighbours were having afternoon parties and her favourite old people’s home in the village, there are now five of them, had invited her as well.

I suggested she went to all of them, imagining her rolling around the village full of champagne.

“Don’t be silly. I couldn’t possibly do that,” she said to me, but then I heard her talking on her mobile to a friend, saying she was going to try to get round all of them.

The morning of the wedding Kayoko rang up and said, “What time are you expecting us?” I pointed out that she wasn’t coming. “Of course I am,” she said, “you are mixing me up with someone else.”

Five guests turned up, four women and one man, all good and early as I was finishing off a plate of cucumber sandwiches. As one helpful friend managed to open the salt cellar and pour salt over everything, I considered the party was underway. Everyone brought champagne and strawberries.

The BBC commentators were rather boring and lacked historical knowledge, they don’t provide context these days as they don’t know it. I recognised the 1930s scroll tiara, and Kayoko turned out to have detailed knowledge of the British monarchy.

“I have studied it,” she said, managing to be both slightly sinister and impressive as usual.

There was a bit of murmuring about the size of my TV screen, comments that it was left over from the Coronation. I wondered if the ladies didn’t spend most of their time glued to the plasma, but we could all clearly see the beauty of the bride’s dress, with its modest grace and clean lines; she was only slightly outclassed by the abbey itself which was the splendid star of the show.

The service was beautiful, and we all agreed, so very English. No multi-cultural, multi-faith junk, at last we were allowed something of our very own, quite a surprise. It was also so simple, one reading by the bride’s very brave brother, no soprano flown in, as Charles would have done, no homily from Stephen Fry although we did keep getting the grotesque spectacle of Elton John.

Among the 1, 900 guests there was certainly a panoply of powerful, complicated hats. Princess Beatrice looked like that little alien who appears on TV trying to introduce us to going digital. Tara Palmer Tomkinson wore something like a giant Quality Street choc, which pointed to her new nose. It seemed to have been made rather hastily, rather large and broad, making her look as if she should be pulling pints somewhere.

Quite unexpectedly it was a perfect Christian marriage service and, delicious irony, no bling. The Middleton family were perfectly elegant and as calmly focussed and unflustered as if it had been just a small country wedding with a local photographer.

How could the mother with two dazzling daughters on show conceal her pride so well? Some women would have burst with it. I take my fascinator off to them.

My mind did slip back once or twice to what I was doing at the other royal wedding, thirty years ago. I had recently arrived in London and was living in a tiny room in a council flat on the Wandsworth Road with a mattress on the floor. Councils hadn’t got round to double glazing in those days and the traffic roared past my window night and day. The mattress had fleas which would bite the back of my neck whenever I tried to sleep but I was glad to be in London. My only certainty in life was that I wanted to be there but I felt appalled by what I saw every day on the streets of Lambeth, the filthy plastic bags hanging in the trees, broken potholed roads and the constant mugging and fear of street violence.

I felt I hadn’t yet found the London that I wanted but I knew it was out there somewhere. By the time of the Charles and Di wedding I was sharing my room with beautiful Bruce, a graceful American I’d met on a trip to Iceland. It was one of those relationships where you know immediately that you must have sex, and you don’t care how or where, up against a wall or under a hedge would do. We managed it in snow under the northern lights, not bad, but as soon as he arrived at Heathrow even across the concourse I could see he was a stranger. I was working as a cleaner in a local pub, the South Pole, but he lay on my mattress all day every day in a fog of marijuana. I wanted to help him but I couldn’t. He’d rouse himself at night and we’d make love, but in the day time we hated each other. He wasn’t the person I’d seen in my mirage in Iceland. Eventually I threw his banjo over the balcony and he followed.

With great determination and drive I set myself up in London all those years ago, but I still haven’t lived in the right place or found the right person.

During the service Kate kept trying to smile at William. At first she couldn’t quite get her face to relax enough, but she was palpably supporting him. In a slight re-run of the Queen Mother George VI situation, Kate, the loved and cherished child of stable parents, doesn’t look neurotic at all. She can provide a damaged prince with just what he needs. Occasionally the Windsors get lucky and find an emotional rescue.

The next day I looked at photos of Charles and Diana on the balcony. There is this child, weak, emotional and needy, and next to him Diana, lunging towards him, also desperate for an overwhelming, unconditional love. He can hardly bear to kiss her. His lips are sealed, his shoulders turned away from her, almost as if he has no idea who she is. He looks as connected as a gay man faced with a busty, blousy, amorous woman. If only Diana had ignored the fact that her face was on all the tea towels, and cancelled the whole show, as Kate would certainly have done if she’d felt like it.

Sandwiches, chocolate rolls, jam tarts, strawberries and cream, broken glasses, squashed sandwiches, crisps on the carpet, my little party went well and everyone agreed it had been a good one – June rang up and said she would have liked to join us but the size of my screen had put her off.

I have my next party, for my birthday, now looming up. I want this one to be small, so that I can really cook something, instead of providing a buffet c/o Waitrose. I have already invited too many people and I bet they will all turn up, oh dear.

Easter Break a year on

27/4/11

At home my mother is very amused to see me looking like Leo Sayer, not that she would know who he was, she’s probably thinking Shirley Temple. She doesn’t of course say it looks nice, but seems fascinated by it and takes lots of photos to show her friends. I am going to tell people I’ve got cancer of the hair.

This time last year we also had radiant weather but I was creeping and crawling around the back ways of the village, almost out of my mind with shock and disbelief.

That was the start of it – a vague diagnosis of cancer, it was “undifferentiated,” which was bad news in its self, they didn’t know what it was but there were “lesions,” and one doctor said that I would have to have chemotherapy whatever it was.

I was also scratching around for work and not getting any. Since then I’ve had pieces in the Telegraph and the Times. My theme seems to be cancer, and the pity of it.

I have also been writing travel pieces for the glossy Private Banking Magazine, all because of the cancer. What a dull, shabby life I’d be having without it.

The anguish of last Spring is almost like a distant story now as I stand in the sunshine in Codsall village, at an open air Easter service, boiling with irritation.

Someone has decided to change the words of, “There Is A Green Hill Far Away.” The word “without,” as in city wall, which puzzled school children for generations, along with “Harold be thy name,” as been replaced by the sternly clear, “outside.”

The translation of the Gospel has been quite a strain for whoever set about hacking at it. They have come up with the idea that when he was mocked Jesus wore “a purple cape,” he was taken to a place called, “the hill of the skull,” and when he was crucified someone put up a “poster,” with the with words “King of the Jews.”

“The place of the skull,” used to be so evocative and sinister. Who are these people who keep changing our liturgy? Perhaps English is their second language. They seem to qualify for the job by having thick cloth ears.

I feel no respect for the vicar, who sounds like a dimmer version of William Hague, or his good lady curate, that they can stand happily listening to such butchery.

On Sunday morning at the 8am service, we are supposed to have the prayer book. It’s actually a pile of leaflets, but I found an old book at the back by the font, with the nice old type face.

“Mike,” a different vicar, very whiskery, introduces the service, just so that we all know where we are, and gives a little homily, based on the Easter gospel; stone rolled away, knots undone, empty tomb, angels present, women unable to find the body.

“Perhaps we should reflect on how we would react in similar circumstances,” he advises. I hope we’d all keep calm and carry on.

He then goes through the service changing every “man,” to “person,” and “indifferently,” becomes “impartially.”

I don’t think he really likes the old service at all, obviously doesn’t see any aesthetic point in it. I suspect the thinks that people go to it because it’s very quiet, a kind of clapping avoidance syndrome. He probably doesn’t realise that people like me turn up to hear phrases like, “indifferently administer justice to the punishment of wickedness and vice,” for the thrill of hearing words that sound like the ruffling of old pages. Well you won’t get any of that poetry stuff in the Midlands it seems.

I was pleased that we used Psalm 118, which has the verse: I shall not die, but live

The Lord has punished me sorely,

But he did not hand me over to death.

The whole psalm is about rejection and gives one a boost of hope.

Later I discovered that this psalm is being used at the royal wedding. It’s about death, abandonment and reprieve. I wonder if they have really read it? Perhaps that is how William the bereaved felt when Katy junked him then changed her mind.

I like my home village but my tastes are different, don’t fit in, and this makes me grumpy. Hearing a new tea shop has opened in Bilbrook the next village, walk over there eagerly. I like to know every cake and sweet shop within a hundred miles.

It’s a gloomy little place with old flap-jacks and submarine rolls with pink icing in the window. They are also offering a children’s party menu: Chicken nuggets, sausages and Dairylea slices. I wonder how that would go down in Chiswick? It certainly wouldn’t go down the throats of infant Chiswickians.

I do all my old walks in glorious sunshine, clinging the remaining pretty parts of the village, wallowing in patches of beauty. It’s a joy that you can still look up and see the ancient tower of St. Nicholas’ church from where ever you stand, except where its obscured by trees in full green leaf. I don’t like what goes on inside but the outside is still breathtakingly reassuring.

Results

A long wait amid the high backed lilac coloured chairs to see the doctor and hear my fate. Interested to note that the whole chemo clinic has now moved. There is a new place for it upstairs – hope I never see it.

Professor Gabra is very charming and almost casually drops the news that I am fine, better than that almost. What do you say? I thought I would skip out of there with joy if I got good news, but when it comes it’s difficult to fully realise.

I also know that I am trapped in some strange kind of relativity; the longer I go on without a recurrence the better are my chances, but the longer I go on the more a recurrence is likely, at least within the next five years.

He asks if there are any “issues” he needs to know. I mentioned the strange inner rumblings and whinings I get. At Christmas I thought these noises and aches and pains in my diaphragm meant the cancer was back. It’s not, so I wonder what they are?

He actually has a name for them, a great long one that I can’t remember. They are caused by the drugs given to stop rejection of the chemo drugs which cause scarring over the peritoneum, if that is the right word - the inner lining of your inside. He says they take years to heal.

I don’t mind, I quite like the sounds which are rather like the noise of overhead cables, wiring and metal springs, or mysterious activity in a haunted house.

I said thank you to Prof. Gabra and his team, for their skill at saving my life. He seemed genuinely pleased to hear that. I said thank you to Mr Gabra and his team, for their skill at saving my life. He seemed genuinely pleased to hear that. Obviously I hadn’t made my gratitude clear enough before, but what happened to me after the operation, the terrible nursing on the Victor Bonney ward and the lack of care when I got home had rather overshadowed the good work of the surgeons.

“We try to provide a first class service,” he said, “but the way things are going we won’t be able to do that much longer. The NHS is heading for a bottom of the line service. The government wants all the money to go to the “community,” and GPs, we are expected to get by on very little.” He sounded genuinely despairing.

I was due to go up to a private view of an exhibition in Highgate. I have two paintings in the show, but after all that all I wanted to do was go home and sit quietly over a Pimm’s and borage in the garden.