Happy new year!

 An unexpected lurch in the blog this time, and slowly written because with only one left hand.  On Monday evening, coming back from friends nearby, I fell by the road and broke my right humerus.  I was operated on at the local hospital.  Back in the evening strapped up, the usual rigmarole learning to sleep on my back

Despite all precautions, though, things turned weird in the morning.  It seemed to me that overnight the fixing had come loose so it was back to casualty for an x-ray.  All carried out in under 3 hours, including after talking to various surgeon’s sidekicks, by mid-morning and checking back with the surgeon, and it seems that the fixing wires and screws are as they should be and that strange sensations are probably due to a haematoma.  Back with relief for lunch and to write this – no photos this time because medical ones are not cheerful and in any case left handed photography is as difficult as LH typing.

I am in good spirits especially now I know what is what, and M is being A BRICK.   But not easy for either of us, and with the best will in the world waiting is the name of the game.

So a couple of thoughts to end this strange old year.  The first is that, aside from sometimes interminable waits, the treatment I have had has been good and courteous – results we’ll see, but so far so good.  A nurse said to his colleague ‘help, this one’s English’ and since I overheard I could reassure him – phew, he thought .  Lots of people ask how long we’ve lived here -  if anything there’s more interest now people know we are not here as EU citizens, and you can see, France scores highly for health services for us.

Earlier this year I quoted Alan Bennett on Victoria Wood (two of my favourite actor/writers of whom sadly only on still survives (and by far the older – we must pay him good attention) She was a great woman, her performance of ‘Let’s Do It’ at the Albert Hall the stuff of legend. I just hope Noël Coward was still around to see it. I first met her, almost epically, in Sainsbury’s in Lancaster at the avocado counter. Her Dinnerladies was often sentimental, but she caught in the part of the handyman, played by Duncan Preston, the idiom of an old-fashioned working-class man, elaborate, literate and language-loving, which is, or was, more typical of the North than the more clichéd dialect-rich versions.  

So I finish with the final passage from his dairy this year There were those in 1914 who believed that war was just what was needed – as a cleanser and a salutary shock. England would be the better for it. As we wait for the result of the final Brexit talks, the heirs of these fools are still with us.  You can read the whole of his 2019 diary here