Memoir

My blogs have got a bit behind. The reason for this is very simple, my mother put her finger on it straight away - '”The fool is too old to keep falling about on this head - his memory is buggered”. Well done Mum - right on the button as always, and of course she is quite right. A great deal of my life has been spent thinking of new ways of falling on my head. As I said to a friend the other day: I have been very lucky - I have had a lot of falls and have never really hurt myself. The trouble is that falling off things is like building up a Debit balance in the bank - one day it gets called in. This is what has now happened to me - I cannot remember what day of the week it is, I have to ask Mrs Poole. She is very good about dates, but it is a bit of a bugger.
I remember when I returned from my last spell of hospitalisation; (that really is a ghastly word) – anyway, the doctors asked me “how my memoir was”. Now “Memoir” means much the same in French and English. Oh, I said - it's fine thank you, just fine; but it wasn't you know - and still isn't. If I do not write things in my note book, they get forgotten and that can be a bloody nuisance - rather like falling on your head.
It was a very beautiful Autumn morning somewhere about last November. I had set off on my tricycle to collect my monthly Euro pills from the doctor in the village. It was a very bright sunny morning and the sun was dazzling me. I imagine that it was also dazzling the driver of the white van that was following the trike and it must have dazzled him to the extent that he not only followed the trike and I - but caught us up and ran over us rather comprehensively. What happened next I cannot really say as I was out for the next 2/3 weeks. I have to get my memoir from Mrs Poole who was following me to the surgery - when she caught up with the twisted remains of the tricycle and her husband I had been joined by 2 doctors, two retired persons, two Gendarmes, who were persisting in trying to breathalyse me, my neighbour on his tractor - about the only person who was absent was the driver of the White van - he had skived off and has never knowingly been seen again
This was how I became introduced to the French Health Service. The assembled company insisted that I be taken to hospital and as I was out of things, I was not in a position to argue. I was lodged in three different hospitals, before I regained consciousness. I do not think that the French Medics like me very much. It seems that I was prone to wander at night. The hospitals did not like this - So they tied me to the bed, however, this is apparently not legal in France, so they started giving me injections. These gave me sleep but they also gave me the most horrific dreams, which stayed with me for a long time.
The other problem that has remained is a lack of balance, which is what brings me to fall in the snow drifts and is rather tiresome, which brings me back to rolling in a snowdrift at the back of the house. I had set out for a walk down the lane when my equilibre gave up on me and I folded gently into a snow wreath at the side of the road. There seemed little point in getting up as my balance might let me down again. I had my mobile and so could ring my wife who was shopping in the town. So I rang her up and laid my head in the snow and hoped for help. Our good neighbour, Gerrard, has the next farm down the lane and he might trundle down in his tractor. Then I heard the tractor, it was coming down the lane, but was turning for the last farm up the lane. I turned on my back and waved my cap in the air...it was Franc - the other neighbour - he was not going to see me - but he was - the tractor turned on the cross ads and - Hooray! - I kept waving my cap and Frank drove straight to me in my snow drift:
'Good Job you saw me”: I said
“I didn't” he said, “It was him”. I had not realised but all the time that I had been grovelling in the road, Pippy my little white terrier had been sitting beside me. Franc had seen a distant white terrier, sitting alone in the road and Franc had come to have a look and had found me sprawled in the snow, with Pippy sitting firmly by my side.
Mother really is quite right, you know; I am truly too old for rolling about on the ground - even with Pip to look after.