Slowing Down Read Online Free PDF

both the kidneys and the liver.I told her I was fully prepared to put myself at risk. She said all right – on my own liver and kidneys be it. Dr Powles laid down a condition before prescribing the little yellow pills – frequent blood tests. It’s a tiny price to pay as the skin disease disappeared as if by magic. To date my kidneys and liver are unaffected, although my own doctor, who knows I drink and have drunk all my life, is quite perplexed as to the latter. She says I’m a medical freak.
    This chapter is the last for the moment to centre on St Mary’s Hospital. Only for the moment, though. At my age I am like a prisoner on remand.
    As a coda, here is the list of the various doctors and surgeons who prod and poke at me at longer or shorter intervals for various possible or proven physical weaknesses. What’s odd though is that most of the time I feel pretty well, even optimistic.
    There’s no need to study this list in detail. It’s just to prove I’m not malingering.
    Dr Soucer – hearing
Prof. Johnston – endocrinology
Dr Kohn/Elkin – chest and allergy clinic
Dr Mitchell – ditto
Prof. Peters – cardiology
Dr Robinson – hepatology
Prof. Wickramesinghe (Wicks) – haematology.

3. A Fair Cop
    ‘We’ll overlook it this time, sir,’ said a young policeman with that unique accent a friend of mine has identified as that (although not uniquely so) of Hendon Police College.
    I had to admit that it had been ‘a fair cop’ (‘archaic’, surely). I’d been caught pissing up against a wall in a fairly dark alley off the Uxbridge Road, Shepherd’s Bush. Knowing I had a card up my sleeve, I was prepared to admit all, including the awareness that I could be charged and fined.
    And here I’ll freeze the frame just as the young policeman asks me, ‘And what are we doing here, sir?’ his torch-beam catching the stream of golden urine which surely made his question superfluous.
    ‘All is not gold that glisters,’ said the monkey as he pissed in the sun.
    But why stop the film at this point? Well, it’s not simply to create tension, a sometimes effective device, especially in the cinema, but to own up to a distressing tendency of us old and ageing: a belief that one’s youth was golden, a way to impress anyone under forty. Scornful of this when young oneself, now it’s our turn to bore our younger friends’ children. ‘A night out in the West End including Marie Lloyd cost a halfpenny less than half-a-crown.’ Fade and replace the old Edwardian barrow-boy with me (same pub, same stool). ‘You may not believe this but in the fifties you could have half a dozen oysters in Wheelers, a grilled sole,cheese and a bottle of house wine for around five pounds.’ Some of my young listeners express, as we did, polite incredulity, masking the acquisition, I suspect, of useful material for future mockery.
    The old can be very touching. On television, veterans of the First World War, and the occasional insertion of a faded snapshot of them in uniform at eighteen, can bring a tear to the most cynical eye, but an endless general banging on about past financial advantages (the comparative increase in average wages is seldom brought up) is to be avoided. I pledge here to try to stick to the format under discussion or that, if I find myself wandering off down a side path, this must be fully justified by the relevance of the incident or anecdote. Me and whose army?
    On a TV programme the other night we assorted ageing talking heads were meant to reveal what we would have done differently if we’d known at twenty what we know now. It was heavily edited but not unfascinating. Mo Mowlam spoke a lot of good sense, but for me the star of the show was Tony Benn. He came across as consistently honest, even though his views are nationally unpopular, and what’s more he strongly advised us, his contemporaries, not to rub the noses of the young in our ‘glorious past’ – Aldermaston and all that. An admirable piece of