Rufus Arrives…

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The brilliant Harry has been keeping the site alive for the past few months, and my absence can partly be explained by my parents both spending some time in hospital. Both thankfully home and recovering now, but it’s been a long summer.
 
When I told my friend Michael about my father’s recent spate of illness, he said ‘welcome to Middle Age’. Which I first thought was a reference to the Middle Ages. Except it was like some sort of corporate paid-for experience of The Middle Ages- all indolent students in lurid tabards, all tankards and chicken legs. But no- to my surprise, he meant my own middle age. At 35 I feel too young to have a dad who’s seriously ill through old age. But The General has been through the mill.

 It’s strange having a Dad who’s a General. I even feel that Dad has to be a Proper Name. He’s usually referred to by people who half-know him as The General, which I’ve always quite liked. It got me into trouble on Facebook recently, when I decided to let people tacitly know that his heart bypass surgery was over, and had been successful, and decided on the cryptic status update ‘The General is out of the woods’. To which someone quickly added a smart alec comment about whether that was some sort of smutty innuendo. It was only after 5 or 6 others had written supportive comments about Dad, that the poor smart alec wrote me a babbling text apologising.
 
The problem was, he wasn’t out of the woods completely, and spent 10 days suffering badly from the effects of morphine on his system. Conversations in ICU would vary from the mundane and real to the Dali-esque with no warning at all. And as he began to breezily refer to films he was appearing in and parties he couldn’t be bothered to go to, I wondered whether he thought he was occupying my life, or what his subconscious thought my life was. I’d gently remind him that he wasn’t doing a film, but his conviction was sincere, and complete. I kept thinking it would start being funny, that we’d joke about it later, but something of his conviction- of the cruel trick that morphine played on him (his medi-vac information now forbids the use of morphine on him) made it seem too soon. And now we don’t want to talk about it to avoid taking him back there.
 
My father’s name is Dick, but he can’t stand being called Dick by people who don’t know him. A generational thing that I don’t entirely understand. The only time I come close is when assistants, particularly in banks, call me ‘mate’, and I find myself thinking, I don’t mind being ‘mate’ to the person who gives me a smoothie or sells me a pair of trainers, but can’t the man with whom I’ve just invested my life savings give it a bit of ‘sir’? So all the nursing staff were under instruction to call him Richard. That way, he’d know they meant him, but it saved him the indignity of being called his real name by strangers. I think this added to his confusion in the end. Several of his hallucinations involved the nursing staff becoming terribly malevolent and sinister: he developed irrational loathing of one or two. Their calling him Richard must have fitted into this alternate reality seamlessly. I really wanted them to call him Dick, or General. But they didn’t. The name General would somehow seem to stitch epaulettes and medals onto the crumpled striped pyjamas he wore for three weeks in hospital. It’s a title which implies years of diligence and dignity, and commands the huge respect of strangers, which would have been useful when he was at his most withdrawn and small.
 
He suffered a stroke just after recovering from his bypass, but transferred to a stroke unit and was home within a week. His resolve to get better is extraordinary. His new best friend is an Air Vice-Marshal, which is a much sexier sounding name than the simple ‘General’- but would roll off the lips of a Midlands nurse even more awkwardly.
 
The NHS staff were simply brilliant. At the worst times in ICU he had a dedicated nurse at the end of his bed for every minute of every day and night. Their treatment was exceptional. And at a time when Obama’s opponents are using terrible manipulation and lies to badmouth our system, I could only be grateful it’s been in place for fifty one years.
 
So now I hope to be a more regular contributor to the steve show posse forum- probably more likely to be theatre reviews- but we shall see….

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Tags: rufus steve show, super posh rufus

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 11:19 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.