A Christmas (fire) cracker

A right (fire) cracker

I LIT up this Christmas. Not intentionally so, but if you set fire to your hair it certainly doesn’t go unnoticed. However, I wouldn’t recommend it at this time of the year when the emergency services are so stretched.

I had been warned. My son said: “Be careful of that candle.” I was, for some reason, bending down and trying to poke spent matches through the air hole of the log burner. The fire wasn’t alight, so I could have opened it up, but where’s the challenge? It was when I tried it for the second time, ignoring the warning, that it happened. I’m not sure if it was the acrid smell or the heat on my cranium that first indicated that I was on fire. But certainly when my boy commented somewhat amusedly, “You know there’s smoke coming off the top of your head?”, I snapped into action, first considering pouring a measure of Laphroaig over the top of my skull, but fortunately stopping before the flaming Christmas pudding effect kicked in. So I slapped at the smouldering tonsure and then doused the top of my head in Irn-Bru.

The smell lingered for hours, at least until my elder daughter came home from a night out with her pals. “What’s the smell?” she asked.

“Oh,” said the boy. “Dad set fire to his hair.”

“Oh right,” she said and sat down, as if it was a normal event. After a minute or two she looked around the room and said: “Who’s that? The sultry one?”

Earlier in the day I had been rooting around in cupboards and found an old framed photograph of me, probably taken about 30 years ago, which I had put on the antique cabinet my grandmother got when she was a cleaner in the big house and the posh family going bankrupt gave away stuff so their creditors wouldn’t benefit.

“It’s me,” I said.

Daughter is a lawyer so she’s accustomed to hurting people. “No it’s not,” shaking her head. She turned to the boy: “Why is our father putting up photos of strangers in the living room?”

“Early-stage dementia, probably,” he replied, picking up the TV remote.

It’s actually the 50th anniversary of the release of the song Fire, which went to the top the charts here and to number two in the States. It was by Arthur Brown, who set fire to his helmet when he sang it. I googled him and he’s still on the go and he also sells commemorative candles of the song. I’ll pass.

I’ve been asked for an encore on Hogmanay. But I’ll pass on that also.

The Queen and I

I MISSED the Queen’s speech for, oh, probably the 45th time. That’s the last time I’ll listen to Jeremy Corbyn’s recommendations. I don’t know what she said but I’m sure it was dull. But not according to chatter on the internet. Apparently she signalled that she was an ardent Europhile. How? By wearing a blue dress and a circular brooch with 12 diamonds. Vexillologists, and pure mad cranks, say this is a clear supportive reference to the EU flag. Hmmm.

But did you see that snap of the royal family in the kitchen allegedly making a Christmas pudding in their best claes? The only thing to take away from that was that they were posing for the camera. I mean, I doubt if they have a raft of recipes ready for an appearance on Celebrity MasterChef. But it was the Queen who drew my attention. There she was, in the kitchen with a handbag over her arm. Not a spatula or a rolling pin, a handbag.

In fact, whenever she’s not wearing a crown she’s always seen toting a handbag. Doesn’t she have a royal toter? And what does she actually carry in it? A German EU passport? Philip’s car keys? Andy’s receipts from the Woking Pizza Express?

Hospital case

Talk about stress on the NHS, as we do at this time of the year, I could show you my scars. Literally. I have been under the knife five times in 2019 (with at least another one scheduled for next year, although neither I, nor the administration, can give a date), added to several more consultations. So I’ve managed to pack in more experience in six months than in my previous lifetime.

The good news is that the staff are unfailingly helpful, cheery to patients, highly professional. The realistic news is that they are being failed utterly.

I am not going to name medics who have treated me or the locations (as I didn’t tell them I would write about it, and didn’t intend to), but they range from senior consultants to orderlies. Nor do I claim that my account is forensic, but it is typical.

We’ve heard about the general shortage of doctors, but, in particular I discovered, there is a chronic lack of both anaesthetists and pathologists. So operations and analyses take longer than they should, which can – only occasionally, one hopes – result in the curable becoming the fatal.

The one common grouse from NHS workers is that there is too much bureaucracy – why do we need 14 health boards, seven specialist ones and one grandiosely and laughably called Healthcare Improvement Scotland, in a country of just five million? – and also that politicians just aren’t listening, never mind acting.

The manifest failures at two so-called super-hospitals are well known, but it’s the day-to-day ones that escape because they are not headline-grabbing. We, the patients and particularly the staff, deserve so much better.

There’s not been much to laugh about, but here’s a mildly amusing and perhaps indicative anecdote. I was lying on the operating table about to have further surgery on a site on my back, but there were two, and the previous surgical notes did not make it clear which one was the target.

The surgeon said she couldn’t go ahead as it wasn’t definitive. I said I wasn’t moving, that I wasn’t going to go back on the waiting list again, so, judging from original photographs and with my agreement, she went ahead on the likely one.

Afterwards she wanted to make a formal complaint about it but I said no, why get some overworked junior into trouble.

I just hope that she and all the other NHS staff in Scotland had a happy Christmas.

The likelihood is that she, and they, did not.