We are at the exciting moment of being about to load everything into the camper van and go.
Mark is making some cheese on toast whilst I write to you, and as soon as I have finished we are going to dive into the shower, after which we will be off to the north.
Because of this I have spent practically the entire day flapping about. Biscuits and fudge have had to be packed into the right sort of boxes for the camper van fridge, and everything we are likely to need, and some things that we are not at all likely to need, has been brought down the stairs ready to load.
I must remember to pack my book about having an organised mind. It is still in my taxi and I am bound to forget it.
Mark came home from work early because of having to go to see the doctor. This was because of the rheumatoid arthritis in his knees. He had an injection in them not long ago, which worked brilliantly and stopped them hurting almost completely, but after we lifted the stone worktops they squished flat and he has been limping ever since.
Of course I went with him, because it was more interesting than flapping, and also I do not like to be left out of anything. If Mark is doing something then I like to know what is going on.
The doctor said that the hospital would probably be a good place to go now, and started to explain about sawing a bit off his knee and mending it with a hinge made out of tin. This sounded exciting, until he added that Mark would need six weeks off work afterwards.
Obviously that is not going to be on our list of Top Ten Favourite Things To Do.
We declined politely, and explained about school fees and the mortgage. The doctor nodded sagely, and said that in that case probably the thing to do would be to keep doing the injections until Oliver was doing his A Levels, after which we could start to consider sawing some bits off.
He thinks that although really it could be done now, it is always a good idea to leave this sort of thing for as long as you can anyway. This is partly because of the NHS budget, but also because if they saw too much off then it is hard to find some knee left behind to which you can attach a new hinge when the first one goes rusty, so as luck would have it we are accidentally doing the Right Thing.
I think that the NHS secretly hopes that you might die in the meantime, thus saving them a couple of hours paying a surgeon, and some costly hardware. What is more, if it is us who die, then they do doubly well, because we have left them our corpses as a present when we die.
A lady telephoned me on that very subject today. She called to tell us that our corpses have got to go to Liverpool University, not Manchester where we originally thought, because we are in the wrong postcode. There is a Postcode Lottery for corpses, and ours have got to go to improve the general surgical knowledge of the youth of Liverpool.
I said that I would not mind this in the least, because I will be dead. It will not be like my usual contacts with large groups of young people from Liverpool, who are usually either stag or hen parties, and on their very worst behaviour for the occasion. I will not need to worry about whether or not they are too drunk to pay the taxi fare, or whether they are going to have a shrieking row and start clawing lumps out of one another in the back seat. Obviously stag and hen parties from absolutely all over the place do these things in the taxi, but the ones from Liverpool do it with a Liverpool accent, which always makes it sound villainous.
It is peculiar to think about being dead and having my skin peeled off by people from Liverpool so that they can see what is happening underneath. They will take my brain out and poke it, and my eyes and my fatty bits, and they will saw bits of me off and put them in plastic bags to be examined by people who want to know how to be doctors.
I think this will be wonderful. It could well be that somebody will look at some sawn up bits of me and then become a brilliant surgeon, saving hundreds of lives.
They might even learn how to put whole new hinges into somebody’s knee without sawing too much bone off.
If anybody is reading this who is likely to finish up with the chore of disposing of my corpse, you have got to ring Liverpool University straight away, practically before I have stopped coughing, because they do not want corpses that have started to go mouldy. You will need to let them know.
Have a picture of the stone work surfaces that were responsible for the squished knee. They were a lot bigger then. They have been sawn up into manageable small bits since.
