Today I have got a very nice thing to tell you.
Today I am very pleased to announce that I am not going to die.
Given that nobody was expecting me to die you will not be at all surprised to hear this, but I can tell you now that it has been a topic of some concern lately.
I did not trouble you all with the details because of there being absolutely no point in bothering anybody else. It would not have made me any less worried, and it would only have made other people upset.
I rang the doctor about something fairly unrelated the other day, and she asked some other questions and then told me that I had got to come in and see her at the surgery, straight away.
Given that the current method of having anything to do with the doctor’s surgery is that you have got to stand in the car park and shout, this was moderately alarming. Doctors do not like actually seeing you at the moment if they can avoid it, and it had taken me two weeks to get the telephone appointment.
I had been so very cross about this that I had written an indignant letter to the Daily Telegraph about it. They printed the letter, and I jolly well hope that the doctors read it. Also the receptionist wants you to explain what is wrong before they will let you have an appointment, which is dreadful. The receptionists just live in the village, have not signed the hypocrite’s oath, and if I had genital warts, which, incidentally I absolutely haven’t, then it is absolutely none of their business.
Anyway I went belting across to the surgery, and she gave me an examination and said that I might have got cancer, and that I had got to go directly to the hospital straight away, without passing Go or collecting two hundred pounds.
Actually it was not directly, it was when they sent me an appointment, which they had got to do in less than two weeks.
I will tell you here, for the purposes of not causing unnecessary worry, that I have not got cancer.
Unnecessary worry is not nice at all and I have had a jolly lot of it in the last couple of weeks whilst the hospital faffed about and lost my details and couldn’t do a triage, whatever that is, and generally were busy doing other things.
We thought about it quite a bit, and thought that it would be a jolly nuisance if I died, more for Mark than me, obviously, because all I would have to do would be to die, whilst Mark would still have to worry about the school fees and the mortgage.
In some ways it was a very nice couple of weeks.
We wondered if there was anything that we would like to do that we hadn’t done already, and whether or not we would like a bucket list, and were surprised and pleased to discover that there wasn’t. If I was going to die, we thought, we were entirely happy with everything we were doing already, and just wanted to carry on doing that. I thought I might like to splash out on some expensive soap and some warmer socks, but that was it.
I was not pleased that George Martin has not finished writing the last book in the Game Of Thrones series, because I wanted to read that before I died.
Apart from that, we thought that we were entirely satisfied with our lives and did not want to do anything different at all. We thought we would like to go and see Number Two Daughter in Canada, and watch Number One Daughter winning some cross-fit competitions. Happily it would no longer matter about being frugal with money. We could just blow it because Mark thought that if I died he would have so many things to worry about that not having any cash would not seem very important.
We have not saved anything up for our old age, but it was a refreshing thought that I might not have to bother.
I had a hospital appointment at four o’clock, but we had just emptied the dogs when they rang up and said that I should come straight away instead.
We dived into the taxi and hurtled down the motorway in the sort of fashion that is not at all good for the life of your tyres.
The hospital was horrid. I will draw a veil over that. I am jolly glad that I do not have to go back again. The doctor chap was nice, but the nurses were not, and the biopsy was a thoroughly unpleasant activity, worse than inhaling brandy or standing on Lego.
Obviously we do not have the biopsy results yet, but the doctor, who had a camera, said that everything looked clean and clear and that there was not the smallest need to worry, and we could go home, which we did, rather more sedately.
We should have gone to work, but we didn’t. I felt a desperate longing to pack up the camper van and run away, but we could not really do this, because Mark has got to work tomorrow, and since I am not going to die we have still got to worry about money.
Instead we compromised by going out to the camper van and starting to take it apart in the back corner where we thought that the back of it was starting to fall off, and I am pleased to tell you that this turned out all right as well. The back is not falling off. It is just some wood in the corner which has had a leak and gone rotten, which on the scale of Great Camper Van Disasters We Have Known, doesn’t matter very much at all.
Mark has stripped most of the rotted wood out and we are going to fix it over the next couple of weeks.
We took the picture when we were in bed in the camper van on the way home from Scotland. It is the view from our window.
Everything, but everything, is quite all right.
