Goodness, I have had a full day.
I have been in Manchester.
My father is not very well, and has been confined in hospital. He telephoned this morning to complain that his life has become just like a chapter in one of Jeffrey Archer’s Prison Diaries. He is not having a good time.
He is not exactly trying to have a good time, and has instead been contemplating escape routes, despite the fact that between the pneumonia and the drugs he is so exhausted that he could barely totter down the stairs. When he spoke to Lucy on the phone this evening, he suggested hopefully that she might pop across and spring him whilst the nurses were not looking. Fortunately, Lucy called me to authorise this before she actually agreed, and we considered that probably it would not take very long before the nurses started looking again, and therefore a discreet hundred-yard sprinting exit would be a bit impractical.
Hence I think that if the hospital is hoping that he remains in his ward until he is actually recovered, they would be sensible to strengthen their patrols and maybe add a few dogs and spotlights, not so much like Jeffrey Archer as much as like the game that Oliver’s prep school used to play on dark winter nights, when the boys had to be escaping Allied prisoners of war and get from the library to the cricket pavilion, and the teachers and their dogs were German guards, the Headmaster completing the picture on the top of the tower with a spotlight. It was enormously popular, and is re-run occasionally in the holidays for fathers and Old Boys, who accompany it with plenty of quaffing and then fall about laughing, completely incapable of sprinting across the cricket pitch with anything at all resembling their eight-year-old vigour.
Anyway, I wanted to go and see him before the weekend sets in, and so I hurried around my walk this morning so that I could set off. Despite my best efforts the morning seemed to be full of faffing about things that needed doing, and by the time I had finished pegging out washing and remembering that we had eaten all of the bananas again, it was almost one o’clock.
Bananas are the staple of our daily diet at the moment, and we had a minor but shocking crisis when Booths ran out of them the other day, probably because we have suddenly started purchasing all of their surplus. I am eating bananas mixed into porridge and Oliver is eating them on pancakes with cream, and we are both eating them as a handy alternative to cooking whenever we can’t be bothered, which is most of the time. Hence a banana shortage is tantamount to a threat of imminent starvation, so I had to rush out and purchase some more before my departure.
Oliver volunteered to go but it was too important to run the risk that he might forget all about it so I went myself.
I had been trying to telephone Lucy to see if she would like to come with me, but she was completely ignoring her telephone because of having more interesting youthful things to think about than impatient messages from her mother, and so she didn’t arrive until the afternoon was almost over.
It was nice to see everybody, and hear stories about hospital adventures, being drugs and nurses and dinners. They have taken his order for tomorrow’s dinner so obviously they are not expecting that he will either peg out or run away in the meantime.
I left him a computer for watching the Olympics, which start tomorrow, but it turned out to be frustratingly complicated, not least because the hospital WiFi is tiresomely minimal, and also he coughs whenever he leans forward to fiddle about with it, so he might just have to invest some colossal sum of cash in the hospital television, which is charged by the day, and the price for which must be adding at least another couple of billion to the NHS finances every year.
I hope they parole him soon.
In the end of course I had to dash back because of working this evening, and indeed, I have now finished doing even that.
It is the middle of the night, and I am in bed.
I am going to give up and get some sleep.
I will see you tomorrow.
