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| WHO WOULDN'T BE INSPIRED BY THIS VIEW ? |
She is such a private person that even after forty years together she would almost never ask me to look at anything unless she was really worried. So I was expecting something pretty large and probably suppurating !
She has only been to her doctor four times in the last fifteen years and mocks me if I go when all I've done is slashed a gaping wound in my hand which needed stitching rather than just letting nature take it's course by allowing the wound to putrify before being eaten clean by the maggots hatching out of the flies eggs that had been laid in the pus!
I was actually sitting at the kitchen table one day trimming a balsa wood model plane with a Stanley knife held up to my eyeline when I really did cut my hand open very badly, severing a nerve, whilst being talked to and thus distracted by my wife and the sight of blood pumping several feet across the surface made her gag and run away, leaving me to grab a towel to bind the wound before driving myself one-handed to hospital ten miles away, in shock and close to passing out, to be told that I had to be operated on immediately and would have to stay the night.
I awoke the next morning with my wounded hand strapped high above my head held up by a drip stand in a ward full of smoking men. As I came to the man in the next bed stared over with relief written all over his face.
"Morning" I said groggily, feeling like someone had left a dead rat in my mouth.
"Listen pal!" he retorted in broad Geordie, "I've nivver hord innywon snawer soa lude as yee! Deryee snawer fer England or wot? Weeyerv hordly slepped ar wink al neet! Diz yor missus hav tee lissen tee that the poower lass?"
Everyone else averted their eyes and were probably very happy when I was discharged soon afterwards.
I drove home still exteremely weak from loss of blood and cleaned up the coagulated blood from the day before that Shirley couldn't face before returning to work one-handed and in great pain!
So I approached the 'lump' with trepidation which without medical training I would say was no more than a miniscule pimple that required no further action and sat down to compose my thoughts knowing that I would be the only other human who would ever see it!
But my thoughts about the Turner prize were broken into by thoughts of my incredibly intelligent wife and her general refusal to go to a doctor and her slight impatience with me if I should suggest that a visit might be advisable after she'd suffered months of double pneumonia because of her belief that nature will sort everything out eventually even if that means she has to cough her guts up to the point where she should have long been in an isolation ward in an isolation hospital on an isolated Atoll !
I get really frustrated when she gets so ill that she can hardly cook my dinner and I even have to make my own coffee!
You are probably getting the impression that Shirley is a bit stubborn and able to make up her own mind without any help, advice or downright interference from me or any other man !
I feel almost sorry for the man who tries to offer her advice or question her opinions !
And God help the man who actually tries to express an opinion of his own!
And if that silly man happens to try to beat her at Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit then he is in for a real hiding as there is nothing that she doesn't know about anything you may care to mention!
Anything!
But all this doesn't mean that she is unable to make public mistakes or misjudgements. We've all said things to others that we don't know why we said them and Shirley's made two beauties. I mean real head-in-hands stuff.
The first as a young student teacher in the wilds of Cumbria, away on teaching practice and attending the local film-appreciation club's showing of the silent Russian classic, 'Battleship Potemkin' complete with English subtitles. In the discussion that followed the film the leader asked if anyone had any idea why the actors employed such grand gestures.
If you've ever been in the situation where a group has been asked a question you'll know that there's always someone, usually me, who'll eventually ask something cringeworthy when everyone else just wants to get out of there.
Shirley's answer which possibly slipped out without a lot of thought was," Was it because they knew the Russian peasants wouldn't be able to read the English subtitles?"
I don't know what the leader's reply was but I can imagine and the thought makes me shudder as if I'd been there and asked the question myself !
Before I move on to her second I suppose I'd better even things out with my best one which happened when aged about fifteen our Biology master was giving THE sex lesson to our class of both sexes.
Having dealt with the wholly embarrassing matter of intercourse and the fact that a penis ( howl! ) was placed into a vagina ( whoops and cheers! ) by two married people (loud howls and jeers of derision!) and that after a certain amount of 'movement' (uncontrollable mirth!) sperm (Yeehaa!) was released (foot-stamping!) by the man reaching orgasm (Howls! Hoots! YeeHaas! and Applause!) in a process known as ejaculation. (everyone falling on the floor and banging their fist and heads into the nearest person!), we came to question time!
Being a doctor's son, I knew the words penis and vagina and had long before introduced my fellows into their meaning and use and as everyone looked at me I felt as if it was only right that I ask a pertinent question which I thought was perfectly reasonable but saw from the way the master's already red and sweating face turned purple, that he possibly didn't want or need to answer; "Sir, how far into the vagina does the penis have to be placed and how much movement needs to take place before ejaculation occurs?"
Thankfully for him the bell went and the class was dismissed without an answer and we filed out to the next lesson with a lot of simulated intercourse taking place all the way down the corridors !.
And we were going to have to find out the answer to my question ourselves!
The answer chaps, if the truth be known and I'm really sorry ladies who already know to their dissapointment is 'not far' and 'not much'!
Shirley's second 'faux-pas' was at an interview for a teaching post where the Headmaster explained to her the importance of the 'Three R's' which in England stands for 'READING,(W)RITING AND (A)RITHMETIC'
"And" Shirley responded "what about maths?"
She didn't get the job!
I'll get back to The Turner Prize in the next installment!
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