Change afoot
Jeremy Clarke
I’ve got a big change coming in the New Year. In January 2006 I will cease being a motorist and become a pedestrian. Two reasons. One, I wish to save the planet. Two, because when I woke up in hospital the day before yesterday, after crashing into the front of a number 134 bus, a big incorruptible policeman was leaning over me asking if he could have a blood sample.
I must have been knocked out. One moment I was driving along a street in east London, the next I was flat on my back on a trolley in A&E with a bandage stuck to my forehead (I’ve still got it on), and wearing a sort of dress embroidered with blue flowers. When I was a lad I used to read the Beano. If someone was knocked out by Desperate Dan, say, the victim’s state of mind would be depicted by a speech bubble containing happy songbirds and the words ‘Tweet tweet tweet’. I couldn’t hear birds chirruping, but mentally I was in a similar, pleasantly dappy place.
The policeman seemed like a very nice man. I told him to help himself. He moved aside and a doctor stepped forward and without a word to me, or a look, expertly removed about half a gill of blood from my forearm. The policeman asked me what I did for a living. When I said ‘journalist’, he and his colleague laughed as if this was the best possible joke.
Then a moon-faced male nursing assistant came and took my blood pressure. His face radiated spiritual happiness. ‘And how are you keeping, my friend?’ he said as he took my blood pressure. I said I was very well, thank you. Then I must have passed out again because the next thing I knew he was shaking me gently awake. ‘My friend. My friend. Your things,’ he said, kindly indicating a bulging bin-liner on the chair beside me. ‘You can go now.’ I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was or what was the time. I tried to sit up. Although this was exquisitely painful, I was successful eventually. I swung my legs down and tried to stand. My right leg wouldn’t co-operate. ‘I can’t stand up,’ I said. In no way did the news diminish the nurse’s cheerfulness. Or mine, for that matter. ‘One moment,’ he said, raising an optimistic forefinger. When he came back, still beaming, he presented me with a lovely pair of aluminium crutches. Supported by these, I could stand without holding on to the bed, but I couldn’t go anywhere.
The next thing I remember is lying flat on my back and rolling feet first along a very long, very wide corridor lined with wonderful works of naïve art. Then my feet being used as buffers to bludgeon our way through a series of heavy swing doors. And finally being carefully aligned under a huge and not aesthetically unappealing Xray machine and being left there.
And then it was day and I was in a bed on a ward. I knew it was day because artificial light had given way to weak natural light coming from a window behind me. My euphoria had given way to despair and foreboding. Everything hurt, my ribs, particularly. I felt as if I’d been trampled by cows. I cast my mind back. I remembered West Ham losing 4–2 to Newcastle, the convivial pub afterwards, the front of the bus, the sickening impact. I remembered also I was meant to be flying to Trieste with my boy on Monday. I remembered that Boris was leaving The Spectator. I remembered the policeman asking for blood. And I remembered the opprobrium attached by every right-thinking person to convicted drunk drivers. My life was in ruins. The curtains around the bed were parted enough for me to see a frail, elderly woman sitting placidly on a commode. How I wished I was her.
A doctor appeared. How was I feeling this morning? Very well, thank you, I said. There’d been a mix-up with the X-ray plates, he said. I had a fractured pelvis. The good news was that it was only a hairline fracture and he was still discharging me.
A different male nurse, one with no inner happiness at all, ordered me to ‘pop’ my clothes on. Moving like a three-toed sloth that has just received depressing news, I sat up, then stood up, then put on my underwear and my torn, blood-stained suit. Socks and shoes took about a quarter of an hour each. And so it was that later that day I was in the hospital grounds, on crutches, slouching towards what, for me, is going to be a pedestrian New Year.
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