Disgressed

We were driving through town the other day and Elizabeth remarked on Woolworths for some reason.

“Aha,” said Katharine, “People think that’s a British shop, but actually it’s American.”

I thought she was right, and up to a point she was, but in fact it is no longer true. The original US Woolworths shops ceased trading ten years ago, and the British version – which apparently had been more profitable than its American parent for many years – is now, following a period of ownership by others, a fully independent British business. It is responsible for the very interesting Woolworth’s Virtual Museum. The German Woolworths (they must have a problem with the pronunciation?) was also sold off when the American parent was in difficulty and remains successfully in business. As far as one can judge from websites, both the British and German versions still have a kind of fraternal similarity.
There is also a Woolworths in Australia and New Zealand, which is a supermarket chain and among the biggest of Antipodean retailers: but it has nothing to do with the original company except that it cheekily appropriated the name of the more famous chain while the rights were still available. Even stranger, there is yet another Woolworths in South Africa, which is actually an affiliate of Marks and Spencer (one of Woolworth’s British rivals).

Woolworths is or was certainly a much-loved part of the British town centre – it may be that the relatively strong persistence of town shopping centres here, as against out-of-town superstores and malls, accounts for its different fortunes on different sides of the Atlantic. What next, though – no cornflakes in America?

The girls and I went up to London to look at Blind Light, the Gormley exhibition at the Hayward. As you probably know, the stuff inside the gallery is complemented by a series of statues, bronze figures which Gormley has cast and installed all around the gallery, facing towards it. Most of them are on the rooftops of nearby buildings, some right by the Hayward while others are across the river or miles away. They are apparently cast from life using Gormley himself, though if they haven’t been subsequently modified he really needs to get his nipples looked at.
I don’t know whether this is great art, but it is very engaging. As you approach, you suddenly see the first of the figures, and immediately begin spotting others. As you move closer, and pay closer attention, you spot more and more of the figures, some far off; and eventually every distant projection on top of a building – probably a scaffolding pole, drains, or air-conditioning apparatus – starts to look like a Gormley figure. A few are at ground level, notably one on Waterloo Bridge, so you can get a good close-up look. I got the girls to stand next to the Waterloo Bridge one for a picture, though they were not very happy about doing so: it reminded me, in a a small way, of the time I took them to see the Saatchi collection, and they really would not even go near the Damien Hirst shark. (Am I a bad father for taking them to see it?)

Gormley is famous for human, or approximately human, figures, of course, from the Angel of the North to the crowds of small rough clay people in the various versions of Field. These too are rather engaging, and I think the latter might easily inspire a species of garden ornament – avant-garde gnomes. The current exhibition features a fairly representative selection of different representations of human figures together with the rectilinear boxes which seem to be his other theme. In one case the two themes are combined, with a room full of concrete blocks (one for the head, one for the body) designed to fit a series of real human bodies – he took measurements from volunteers of all sizes. This must have been inspired by the process of having a whole-body plaster cast done, I think – the effect is rather like a series of brutally Modernist mummy cases, though the smaller children at the show took the room full of the things to be a kind of maze.

The centrepiece. though, is the glass box of fog which gives the whole thing its name. To call it fog doesn’t really do it justice: it is intensely thick, uniform and white, and once inside you can’t see a thing unless it’s within inches of your nose. I found myself automatically lifting one hand to shade my eyes, which is of course completely futile. Again I don’t know whether it’s great art, but like the slides at the Tate, there is an undeniable element of fun in it. Perhaps we’re moving into an era when fine art reaches a friendly accommodation with the fairground: it might be rather nice.

Today sees the end of an era for me. For the last nine years or so, I have been walking to school or nursery with one or both of my daughters every morning, but today was Sarah’s last day of term at Holy Trinity, and next term she’ll be travelling to Wallington girls on the bus by herself.

Poor Elizabeth got the worst of it, really. In the early days when they were both going to nursery, she used to have to trot along while Sarah rode in the pushchair. Then when she started at school, she had to come to the nursery first before we walked over to the school, about as far again. But luckily (or perhaps necessarily) she was always a fairly brisk walker. She would obligingly do one and a half steps at a time (I don’t know how else to describe it) to keep up with me, or with the pushchair, while Sarah, once she started walking, invariably hung back and allowed herself to be partly pulled along. After the pushchair period, I would find myself walking along with Elizabeth a yard in front, chafing to speed up a bit, and Sarah a yard behind.

Elizabeth and I used to make good use of the time we spent walking over to school, though. I used to insist on testing her on her spellings, curmudgeon that I was, and more entertainingly we used to take it in turns on a daily basis to tell each other stories. The convention was that whoever was supposed to tell the story had to offer the other person a tantalising choice of scenarios.

“Ha!” said Elizabeth the other day, “I remember that. I used to say something like, do you want the story about the dog, or the story about the fox? You would have got the same story either way, it would just have been about a different animal.”

It’s surprising how these rituals establish themselves. For a couple of years, we used to have to stop and spend a few minutes looking in the side window of the art shop every day: the side window featured toys and novelties which were changed fairly regularly (not daily, though, for heaven’s sake). These days I notice it only contains a relatively dull selection of sketch pads, pens and so on, which is strangely disappointing.

Sometimes I used to bring them home at the end of the day instead of delivering them in the morning, and occasionally we would stop to buy a Kinder Surprise egg, or run up the disabled ramp at the leisure centre (I still don’t understand why this was a particular treat, but it definitely was). In the winter, they had torches to make the walk in the dark more agreeable.

When the three of us first started going directly to school, I tried to help out by carrying bags: but it didn’t work. One day I had to rush back to school and hand a bag to the headmistress; shortly afterwards I got all the way into the office with a blue Beddington Infants bag still clutched in my hand. Latterly I have helped Sarah with her trumpet once or twice – it seems to be heavy enough for me to remember I’ve got it.

Every year the schools have a campaign to encourage children to walk to school: these days I think they have the modest target of getting them to walk once a week. By that standard, we’ve done pretty well, walking almost every day in the year. Except for the odd day when Katharine delivered in the car, and a year or so when we used to get the odd lift from a friendly mum up the road, we’ve been plodding away through the rain, the snow, and the searing heat (alright, not the searing heat). 

I remember it was quite a milestone two years ago when Elizabeth started travelling to school by herself. I stopped going all the way to the school gate with Sarah some while ago; and now I shall be taking the short stroll to the station on my own. Where am I going to get my minimal quota of exercise now?

So on the Wednesday morning I found I was feeling terrible. It varied a little bit over time, but only between the feeling of a bad hangover and a really bad hangover. I had a headache, my stomach was churning, I couldn’t concentrate. Unfortunately, I had a relatively important meeting scheduled for 11.30, so I hung on. In an hour or two, given a couple of paracetamol, even the worst hangover should start to improve slightly. There again, it couldn’t actually be a hangover, since I hadn’t had anything much to drink on Tuesday night. Possibly some kind of food poisoning? I began to feel as if I really wanted to vomit, but that never quite became possible.

The meeting was postponed until the early afternoon. By now I had given up any attempt to do actual work: I had the papers for the meeting propped in front of my eyes in a way that I hoped made it look as if I were doing some uncharacteristically careful preparation, and that was about it. Carefully I considered the imminent contingency of lunch. It was not at all clear whether food or starvation would do most harm to the state of my stomach, but I decided to try a sandwich and some water.

I began to feel somewhat better. The meeting was postponed again. Now I shifted in my chair and suddenly found that my inner thigh hurt when I moved. At the same time the rest of my symptoms returned with new force. What on was this? A blood clot in my leg? Necrotising fasciitis? Trousers too tight around the waist? A quick investigation in the gents revealed that the top of my left leg at groin level looked a bit red. Nothing that chafing pants couldn’t account for, possibly.

The meeting proved easier than expected, and with the encouragement of colleagues I went home. I now discovered that there was another red patch on my left shin. I passed an uncomfortable evening.

It so happened that Katharine was leaving for Edinburgh the next morning, to look after her father while he had his cataracts done. I would be in sole charge of Elizabeth and Sarah until Tuesday.

“Are you sure you’ll be alright?” she asked, as I dropped her off at the station.

“Oh, yes.” I said, “I’m going straight up to the doctor now. Probably a virus, you know, like it always is.”

The doctor raised his eyebrows slightly at the sight of my leg. The shin was actually very red now over a considerable area, and my thigh was nearly as bad.

“No wonder you don’t feel well. That’s significant.” he said and took my blood pressure and temperature. “Now,” he said to the student with him, “Without even touching Mr Hankins, what can you guess might be wrong with him – just looking”

“Ah… He er, has a bad leg?” offered the student.

“Caused by? What could it be? Well, alright – do you think it could be an infection, say? It’s significant, isn’t it?”

After some further investigation, the doctor called in a colleague (with his student): a somewhat senior doctor, and more of a skin man, I gathered. They conferred in an undertone.

“Ooh yes. Cellulitis.” said the senior doctor. They conferred in an undertone some more.
“That is really significant isn’t it?” said the original doctor, putting his hand reassuringly (actually rather the reverse) on my shoulder. “What would you do?”

“Me?” said the senior doctor, “Well – I wouldn’t muck about if I were you.”

“OK, Mr Hankins.” said the first doctor, with another comforting pat on the shoulder, “I’m afraid you really need some tests, and some injections. I’ll give you a note for the hospital, and if you go straight up there they’ll sort you out.”

I didn’t quite go straight up there. I’d come out without any preparation, so I had to go back to get some money for the exorbitant hospital car park and a book for the inevitable long wait.

At A&E I sat down in a room of gently seething people. One woman stalked to reception desk and furiously pointed at the clock. Perhaps she couldn’t trust herself to speak; perhaps there was something wrong with her throat.

“I’m really sorry,” said the receptionist, “It’ll be an hour now. An hour and a half.”

The man sitting next to me called a friend to say he wasn’t going to be around that morning.

“Appointment? Yeah, I got an appointment. It don’t seem to make any difference round here.” he exclaimed, looking pointedly at the reception desk.

“Peter Hankins?” said a nurse. I had been there five minutes. I could feel the eyes burning into my back as I left the room.

The nurse asked me a few standard questions and filled in a form (the third so far). She took my blood pressure and checked my temperature.

“I’ll show you where it is.” she said “They’ll draw a line round it to see if it’s getting any bigger, and tell you to rest it. One of the medical doctors will see you and then they can decide whether to admit you.”

Admit me?

She took me up through a maze of corridors to a remote corridor where there was a small bay with beds in. A couple of men were cleaning the floor.

“Oh, you can’t get in there at the moment.” she said, ” Never mind. There’s a seat. Give this to a nurse. OK? Now don’t sit there all day without seeing anyone, will you?” So this was to be my punishment for escaping so easily from the A&E waiting room? I congratulated myself on bringing a book.

In due course a nurse did indeed take my note and move me to a chair worryingly adjacent to an empty bed. Next to me there was a youth in what seemed unsuitable clothes, whose name I never learned, and who spent much of the following few hours asleep. Opposite was an elderly man named Pat, a retired tree feller who was being treated for dehydration, though he seemed to know the hospital fairly well. He had had both hips replaced at least once, probably the effects of a lifetime of tree-felling, though he was built on an altogether more solid pattern than me, and looked as if carrying trees around would have been nothing much in his youth. He evidently liked unfelled trees too, since he gave me directions to a number of his favourite bits of woodland: it was evidently a pretty poor reflection on me that I’d lived in the area for 15 years without visiting these places.

After a while I was approached (I probably looked the best prospect) by a visitor from the hospital chaplaincy, a man in his seventies, rather frail-looking himself, who did his best to make conversation in spite of being somewhat deaf and then presented me with a small lavender bag with a text attached which he insisted I should read aloud.

“Do you like lavender? I suppose you do, coming from Wallington?” he asked.

“It is a bit of a local thing, isn’t it?” I replied (This is true: in the ninetenth century lavender-growing was about the biggest single business thereabouts, and there are still some relics of the trade.)

“Mitcham!” said Pat loudly, “They grew lavender up at Mitcham. You’d know that if you knew your local history.”

At last the medical doctor (Aren’t they all medical? Did the hospital have doctors of philosophy on the staff? For that stubborn, nagging angst?) arrived. She asked me some questions and filled in a form, examined me carefully and very thoroughly, and measured my blood pressure and temperature. Had I been bitten? Had I injured my leg? Anything else?

Lunch arrived for Pat. Since you have to order the day before, I didn’t expect to get anything, though I was beginning to feel hungry even though my stomach was still feeling very unstable. After a few minutes a friendly young man turned up with a covered plate.

“It’s fish.” he said, “We’ve run out of sausages. I didn’t give you any chips, but I could get you a few if you like.”

“Well that might be nice.” I admitted. He returned with the fish and a very small portion of chips, which I rapidly ate. Ten minutes later he returned, looking slightly peeved and with a salad.

“I mistook you for him.” he said, gesturing at the sleeping youth, “That was his lunch. I suppose you don’t want this now, do you?”

Lunch went down alright. At length the consultant came along and had a look, too. He asked me a few of the standard questions (I had the answers off fairly smoothly by now) but did not insist on checking my blood pressure.

“It’s pretty typical, actually,” he said rather disappointedly to the other doctor and turned to me. “Now we’re going to give you some antibiotics intravenously for a couple of days,” he explained, “And then we’ll give you some tablets to take for four weeks. If things get worse at that stage, or you have any problem, go back to your GP.”

“I have a problem.” I said “I can’t really stay here. I’m in sole charge of my two daughters this week. In fact I really need to leave by three o’clock in order to meet the younger one at school.” And if I don’t get my car out of the exorbitant hospital car park today, I’ll be bankrupt.

“Well, we’ll have to see what your blood tests are like,” said the consultant, “You might have to stay here for your own safety. But if they’re OK, perhaps the ICT could do it? Could someone ring them and find out whether they’re happy about doing it?”

They were most sympathetic and helpful, but it is extremely difficult to make arrangements quickly in these circumstances. They asked the pharmacy to prepare all the antibiotics I would need, together with syringes and other equipment. They contacted the ICT (Intermediate Care Team) to see whether nurses could come to my house to give me the intravenous injections. They put a cannula in a vein in my hand and gave me the first dose.

“You ain’t gettin’ out of here tonight, mate.” advised Pat. “Not once they’ve got that needle in you.”

One of the doctors let me use the phone to get a message to Sarah’s school, telling her to go to the Grange, an after-school group she still uses some of the time. But shortly afterwards, they decided that the pharmacy was not going to come up with my stuff for four hours or so, so they let me go home in the meantime. I was waiting at the Grange when Sarah arrived; at home, Elizabeth hadn’t even noticed anything out of the ordinary. I explained that I had to go back to hospital later to pick up the medicine, and that the night nurse would come to the house about ten o’clock, and another nurse about eight o’clock the next morning.

“You’re going to be a bit late for work then?” observed Elizabeth.

Instead a regime of four visits a day began. It was quite interesting to observe the small difference in technique. At the hospital they shoved the needle of a large syringe directly into the yellow spigot on the cannula for both antibiotics, and attached a syringe to the green spigot for flushes with water. The visiting nurses attached a small extension to the yellow spigot and used that for everything. The nurses from Sutton asked to wash their hands; nurses from Merton mainly used cleansing gel out of a bottle. Although they were all friendly, the night nurses were rather jollier than the day ones, and urged me to sit in an armchair while they injected the stuff, whereas the day people would call me over to a carefully set-up area on the table.

I began feeling better quickly, and the red area on my thigh began to fade: but my shin carried on getting worse for a day or two before it turned the corner: at its worst, it was quite painful to stand up on. By the time they took the cannula out again (it was much longer than I had imagined) things were very much better. I’m still working my way through my stock of oral antibiotics (four of one kind, one of another, four times a day).

It’s still a mystery what caused the infection. Diabetes is a predisposing factor which I can do without (as is HIV, though I feel fairly confident in ruling that out). Perhaps when I go back to the hospital for review some further light will be shed on the question.

I had a call from the hospital the day after I finished the intravenous stuff.

“Mr Hankins? I’ve been doing your blood tests, and I have to tell you that one of the samples has shown evidence of an infection. How are you feeling?”

“Well, not too bad now.”

“Oh, that’s good. It may be a false result; in fact I think it must be because otherwise you wouldn’t be feeling well at all. Not at all. If you do start feeling unwell, come straight to the hospital. But you’re OK?”

“Well, I’ve been having intravenous antibiotics, and they seem to have worked.”

“You’ve been having antibiotics? So… Ah, so the tests were because… They already identified an infection… OK. Good.”