Dearie me, it has rained.
It rained and rained and rained last night, like in the Christian song, Our God Rains, well he certainly did.
It rained so much that when I got up this morning and had to drive to Barrow, all of the roads were flooded.
Usually Barrow is about half an hour’s drive from our house, but I do not like being late for things, so I set off an hour and a half early, and it was a jolly good job that I did.
The road to Newby Bridge, which is practically the only way from Windermere to Barrow without doing a thousand mile detour, was overflowing with massive puddles, several of which were more than two feet deep. Some had council workmen in them, swearing and trying to unblock the drains, and gesturing advancing motorists to turn around and buzz off somewhere else.
I ignored this and drove through anyway.
I have some experience of both driving through, and getting marooned in, massive puddles, I have not been a taxi driver in the Lake District for all these years for nothing, although it feels like it when we count the takings some nights. Hence I have got some reasonable idea of just how badly I can abuse my poor taxi before the air intake valve begins to inhale water and the engine starts to drown.
I know that it can bear some carefully controlled water boarding when I want something badly enough.
Hence I disregarded the officious wavings of men in wetsuits with plunging rods, and sailed through, carefully. Generally it is all right to do this as long as there is nothing coming the other way creating a wake.
When I got to the main road, the one Mike Harding described as the longest cul-de-sac in the world, I thought I would be away, but it was not to be. The council, for some arcane council reason, had decided to dig it up. Actually that is not true. They were not digging the road up. They were digging a large, muddy hole around a lamp-post several meters back from the road on the grass verge, but needed somewhere on the road to park their truck whilst they were doing it, and so had employed fifty yards of traffic cones on either side, and a slow set of traffic lights.
These were creating a tailback of gloomy wet motorists for a couple of miles in either direction.
I was going to the hospital, not for anything interesting, just for one of the check-ups the NHS is generously offering to everybody at the wrong end of middle age, to see if you have got various sorts of cancer. It appears that if you have got one of the sorts of cancer, they don’t do anything much about it, but at least you can die knowing that you had an early diagnosis.
I parked at the hospital. This is not somewhere I am in the habit of visiting, it being a different one from last week’s hospital, and then tried to find my way in.
Readers, this turned out to be almost impossible.
I know that people say these things, and really they mean that they had to trail around for five minutes, following confusing signs and rolling their eyes, but in this case it actually was very difficult indeed, and I imagine is one of the methods by which the NHS has managed to deter time wasters.
The car parking meter was almost completely incomprehensible, and I would remind you that I am no slouch when it comes to general literacy. It was about as lucid as some instructions we once had with an electric fire from China which warned of potential damage to our hat stand should we fail correctly to circle the finger on the switch.
The back of the hospital was a determined red-brick barricade, resembling nothing as much as the wall around Strangeways Prison, which I visited once, although not as an inmate. There was a little path around its edge, following various twists and turns, every one of which concluded in a solid brick wall and I had to retrace my steps. Eventually I found one which led to a doorway, with an encouraging notice on it which said: Use this entrance for main reception as link bridge is currently closed, so I did.
Inside was a small box room with a lift and nothing else. There was a sign on the lift which said Do not use this lift if you can walk.
I used it anyway. It had the choice of one floor, so I pressed that. The doors opened and closed three times before it finally set off.
Its destination turned out to be another small box room, with nothing apart from a flight of stairs, this one going down, so it was a good job I could walk. I went down the stairs, which terminated at a doorway. I went through the doorway, and discovered I was outside again, about ten yards further along from the first doorway.
I was reminded of those splendid toys you see on eBay. They are a box with a switch on them, you switch the switch and the box opens. A hand comes out and switches the switch off. The box closes.
I walked all around the hospital, through a little wood and across the grass, which turned out to have been planted with stinging nettles to deter anybody from walking there. Eventually – after almost twenty five minutes – I found the entrance.
There were signs there. I followed them to my destination, which I reached with seconds to spare. It was empty, apart from a sole nurse.
I wouldn’t mind using the loo, I said. Ah, she said, we don’t allow people to do that here. Our loo is just for the staff. You have to go to the one round the back, it’s quite a long walk, and sometimes it’s locked. I’ll just get you done quickly and you can go and find it.
I was out in five minutes, and twenty minutes later had found an unlocked loo. Then I trekked, intrepidly, back to the car park.
It took me a further hour and a half to get home.
Hurrah for the NHS, that’s what I say.
