Low life
You can go off people
Jeffrey Bernard Oedema sounds like an orchestral suite by Sibelius and the written word even looks like one. Unfortunately, it is a build- up of excessive fluid in the tissue which is making my leg and foot look like a party balloon. I don't seem to be getting used to the limitation on my fluid intake and I am becoming more and more obsessed with drinking cups of tea all day long. In spite of the vodka over the years, tea has always been my favourite drink and I should have chosen it as my luxury when I did Desert Island Discs.
What with the new boredom of dialysis and the desperation of thirst — particularly during our recent weather — I have had lit- tle thought for anything else this past week, but I have heard two remarks which pulled me up short. I telephoned my daughter in Majorca and her mother answered the phone and told me that she had read about my collapse in Morocco and then she asked me to tell her about it in more detail, This I did — and, remember, she asked me about it, I did not volunteer the weary anecdote. I told her what had happened as concisely as I could. When I had finished there was a slight pause and then she sighed and said, `I've got to go to a party tonight and I've got absolutely nothing to wear.' - I was slightly amused of course, but I was also irritated and exasperated that, even with the advancing years, she could still remain so self-preoccupied. Incidentally, I know a man who is so self-preoccupied that many have thought him deaf for the first few months of their acquaintanceship. Yes, she is quite remarkable in many ways is my ex.
Then there was another brief conversa- tion on the telephone, this one with a young woman who is quite close to me and she said something that made my blood pressure soar into the danger area. After her enquiry as to my health and my giving her the information, she said, 'You are lucky not to be in hospital 24 hours a day.' I still feel angry about such a 'you've only yourself to blame' remark. She may as well have told me that I am lucky to have just the one leg. And anyway I have yet to hear of kidney failure being a self-inflected com- plaint. And what if it was?
But, apart from these two ridiculous but anger-provoking remarks on the telephone, the week has somehow seemed leaden and depressing thanks to the epidemic of hali- tosis that is sweeping the nursing staff of the Middlesex Hospital and because of the death throes of the Olympic Games, the whingeing excuses for our performances in the national press and the appallingly bad sportsmanship of the American spectators. As usual, American values have not exactly risen to Olympian heights. You can go off people, as they say. It is in America too that the awful disease now sweeping this country, in which everybody wants to be equal, originated. It wouldn't be quite so bad if people simply wanted to be equal to whom? — but they think they deserve to be equal. But those American spectators show no enthusiasm, no admiration and sometimes downright hostility towards any competitor who is not American, In fact their conduct during the gymnastic events was quite disgusting and horribly sentimen- talised by the injury,to Shirley Temple II.
What was so refreshing was to see an interview with Olga Korbut with whom I spent a day drinking champagne in a VIP restaurant just outside Moscow 25 years ago. She still has that smile that can only be described as radiant, and perhaps now that she earns good money teaching gymnastics in Atlanta it may now be fixed. I managed though to make her frown quite a bit all those years ago when I kept urging her in whispers to defect to this country or Amer- ica where she could earn if not a mint then a very good living indeed. Most people recognise how very brave these gymnasts are, but it must also require nerves of steel to dive backwards from a 10-metre-high board never mind to tell me that you've got absolutely nothing to wear or that I am lucky not to be in hospital for the rest of my life.
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