Personal Services

          A painful shoulder, like the one I experience from time to time, is pretty tiresome (an appropriate word, I think, since the pain can be sleep-depriving). So, after a recent prolonged episode, I decided to seek medical help and asked around for a recommendation. A friend, who happens to be a doctor, gave me the name of an osteopath and I made an appointment two weeks hence. I was fortunate, in the meantime, to have had no more occurrences – especially as I was more than usually physically active, the fine weather having enticed us to take the campervan to Land’s End to walk sections of the SW Coast Path.

          By the time my appointment with the osteopath loomed, the urgency for treatment had waned considerably, but experience told me not to assume a spontaneous cure, so I duly turned up. The practice is situated in a quaint cottage in a sleepy, picture-book Devon village, some half an hour’s drive from home. I followed the sign on the front, which sent me through to the pretty little backyard, where an open door invited me in. Another sign said, ‘waiting room’, so I ventured in there, expecting to be met. There was no one around, nor was there any sound, except for the buzzing of a fly bashing against the window. Just as I was about to call for attention, a young woman came down the stairs, introduced herself as the practitioner and asked me to follow her back up the stairs. Still there was neither sight nor sound of anyone else in the small building and the intimacy of this arrangement began to strike me as unusual: it was somewhat awkward for me but potentially dangerous for the practitioner, who knew me only by name at this stage. But she was obviously more at ease with this informal encounter than I was. She betrayed no concerns.

          The formalities of recording my details completed, things began to get personal. I was asked to remove my shirt and stand facing a wall. Not that this was unexpected, but the intimacy of having my bared torso explored by the hands of a young woman I had met only minutes before re-booted my memory to more youthful days, when such things were known to happen – occasionally and under different circumstances. Of course, I kept my cool and she her professional sang froid, though I remembered a similar sort of awkwardness when, a couple of years ago, an attractive young optometrist inspecting my eyeballs got as close to my face as is possible without our noses actually touching. How she kept from giggling must be a professional secret.

          After her examination of my shoulder and interrogation of my symptoms, the osteopath talked me through a detailed diagnosis involving Latin descriptions of moving parts. She knew her subject, it seemed. As to treatment, however, I’m not so sure. After all, what can you do about a shoulder socket that is suffering from wear and tear and that sometimes causes the muscles and tendons to become inflamed? “Relax it,” she said. For the next forty minutes or so, I laid face-up on the treatment bed, while she gently placed her hands under various parts of my body: my calves; my lower back; my shoulders and neck. During this time, she said nothing and I kept my eyes closed in an attempt to relax as instructed. Thus blind, I could only guess where her eyes were directed, or her thoughts wandered. My guess is that she was bored but too professional to let it show. At the end of the session, I paid the fee, agreed to come back next week for a follow-up and left the cottage via the still-empty waiting room.

          That evening, at a board meeting, a fellow member commented on my constant grimacing and rubbing of my shoulder. “I went to the osteopath this afternoon and she’s made it worse”, I said. There was knowing laughter.

 

Business As Usual?

          If there are people still resisting Covid vaccination, you don’t hear much about it these days. And, despite the World Health Organisation last week declaring the emergency to be over, I received an email soon afterwards inviting me to go for the latest booster. I opted for a local walk-in centre in preference to the comparatively tedious alternative of going online to book a timed slot. I wasn’t the only one. When I arrived at the makeshift facility, it was more a queue-up than a walk-in. I joined a line of fellow pensioners snaking out of the door, anxiously calculating whether we could hold out until a visit to the toilet became imperative. Still, the NHS staff were friendly, cheerful and efficient and the whole affair was refreshingly free of face-masks and the accompanying air of doom that had imbued the first sessions back in February 2021. Everything was back to normal.

          The next day was the coronation of King Charles the umpteenth and, though it failed to ignite a patriotic fire in my breast, I couldn’t resist a bit of daytime telly while doing the housework. Consequently, I saw some strange behaviour (a female MP holding up a long sword in front of her face?) and some excessively fancy outfits. And, although there was some rather good music, I stood agape as the Protestant bishops did their unconvincing best to tie the authority of the Monarch to that of their God and thereby impose a form of theistic authority on a population that is no longer majority-religious. Meanwhile, outside the Abbey, 64 people were arrested for planning a protest against this absurd imposition. In the days that followed, a swell of indignation began to make it look as if the government’s heavy-handed Section 14 legislation, which was originally aimed at “eco-crusaders turned criminals” *, had backfired and was now being used to prevent ‘respectable’ people from publicly expressing their opinions on other matters. Even the Metropolitan Police were embarrassed.

          As was I, to some extent when, the following day, having deliberately not signed up to the residents’ lunch-time garden party organised around bringing and sharing food under strings of union jack flags, I found it was still going strong in the early evening when I returned from an alternative, anti-celebratory, vegan barbecue. My by-then well-oiled neighbours insisted I join them for a drink and, despite their suspicions of my left-leaning politics, were jovial and friendly – those few I engaged with – and one of them, discovering we shared a love of jazz, dropped all conversation about monarchy and turned instead to a plan to start our own jazz appreciation society. I suggested that the first session might feature a few monarchs of the genre – Nat King Cole, King Curtis, King Fleming, King of the Clarinet: Artie Shaw, King of the Jazz Guitar: Django Reinhardt, King of Swing: Benny Goodman and a few Dukes and Earls for back-up – and the irony was not lost on him. We should get along fine.

          As an antidote to flag-waving and controversy, I spent the next two days, with my Other Half, hiking in the pretty countryside around Dartmouth. Although we got rain-soaked, there were sunny intervals, the most memorable of which shone down on a deep-green, grassy hillside carpeted with a sublime mixture of bluebells and buttercups. The colour palette was so spectacular it easily shamed the tawdry attempt of Westminster’s finest to impress us with their artificial splendour.

          Before heading home, we mooched around the pretty estuary town of Kingsbridge (there’s no escaping our heritage), where I overheard two women talking. “How’s John?”, said one. “He’s fine. Just had his hips done, now he’s waiting for an operation on his back,” replied the other in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, as if it was completely routine. After all, God is in Heaven and His anointed King sits on the throne. Everything is back to normal.

* Priti Patel, when Home Secretary in 2020.

 

Escape From Reality

          The season is changing. One by one, the boats in the yard opposite our window are being lifted back into the water, floating off to who knows where. We’ve turned off the central heating and can now leave the curtains open to the longer hours of light and sometimes magnificent sunsets. The downside, however, is that the wintry evenings cosied up to watch movies at home have come to a natural end. La fin! This means that I’ll never clear the backlog on my list. And, to some extent, the same applies to reading novels, as that is a pleasure I’m still not comfortable indulging until after dusk.

          But, before shutting up shop for the summer, I did manage to read a couple of Patricia Highsmith novels and to watch Plein Soleil, the 1960 French movie adaptation of one of her Tom Ripley stories, in which all the main characters are young, slim, attractive, dressed by Pierre Cardin and dedicated to gambolling aimlessly in the sophisticated but relaxed Mediterranean milieu that predated mass tourism. If that was all you ever saw of that era, you might imagine it to be paradise – as long as you kept clear of Ripley.

          Meanwhile, in the everyday real-life world of the here and now, where sports- leisure wear passes for fashionable garb and poverty is in the face of every city-dweller, it is polling day for the local elections. The emphasis in this household is on supporting independent hopefuls so as to overcome the problem of major party candidates being torn between loyalty to their factional interests and delivering on their constituents’ actual priorities. But, mindful of the epithet “Society is like a stew. If you don’t keep it stirred up you get a lot of scum on the top”, I encourage anyone who will listen to make use of their franchise, regardless of their preference. Local election turnout is too often woefully low – as if the majority of electors has no interest in the outcome or believes itself powerless to influence it – yet the incumbent government has chosen to address this democratic deficit by making it worse. It has introduced a new requirement for voters to produce photographic identity at the polling stations, knowing that this is unnecessary and that it will discourage those, such as the poor or otherwise marginalised, who may not have the documentation. Little by little, government finds ways to ensure that the scum remains undisturbed.

          Even if the elections do produce some changes, we have the coronation to remind us of who is really in charge. We face the prospect of a nation rejoicing in its heritage of subjugation to a monarchy that imposed itself by force and now seeks to cling to its privileges by means of a cunning mix of patronage and the appeal of patriotic nostalgia. Not that I am totally against patriotism, nostalgia and a figurehead around whom we can unite as a nation. It’s just that I would prefer a cheaper, less extravagant version and, since I am not confident of being able to explain this point of view at our residents’ planned coronation garden party, I’ve opted not to attend. Instead, I shall gather my dissident pals for a picnic in the park, where conversations might develop around topics such as a cost-effective monarchy and the fight against privatisation of public goods (like parks, for example). With the police busy keeping an eye on the crowds at Westminster and Windsor, we shouldn’t be too much at risk of arrest under the newly and hurriedly sanctioned Section 14 laws.

          Of course, I don’t expect a whole season of unremitting exposure to such bleak realities. Summertime in Britain is bound to bring the odd rainy day – perfect for a temporary escape to the alternative worlds of films and novels.