Slowing Down by George Melly Read Free Book Online Page B

Above all I want to avoid becoming an old fool, like several very senior citizens of my acquaintance (what a load of verbal under-the-carpet-sweepers we have become). I’ve seen too many ‘senior citizens’, Conroy Maddox for a recent example.
    Selfish? What of those who’ll miss me? Well, they’ll do that, I suppose, whatever I die of. In my experience, however, they’ll get over it. Affection eventually replaces grief. Anecdotes, usually humorous rather than adulatory, supplant tears or are proof of diminishing loss. One’s moment of death is not in one’s hands anyway. It’s fate which kills you.
    ‘He rambled and he gambled and the butcher had to cut him down.’ Old New Orleans funeral chant
    I also have incipient emphysema, a killer with no cure, which prevents breathing. As it progresses, oxygen helps, but finally there’s nothing. You drown in your own waterlogged lungs. I’ve read a certain amount about it: the late and remarkable Ken Tynan crawling about the floor battling for breath; a friend of Digby’s, who, he told me very reluctantly only when I pressed him, on his final visit was projectile-vomiting blood at the walls of his hospital room. So I’ve two horses galloping towards Death’s losing post. I’d prefer cancer as at least they drug you with morphine, and to die a happy junkie is surely preferable to redecorating a hospital ward.
    The good Dr Kohn, after the reappearance of this second white nodule, had the entire lungs re-scanned. He told me that if I continued to smoke, the emphysema was certain to accelerate. I do smoke. My struggle (not very heartfelt) against it, despite the support of Diana, has failed severaltimes, but that is a fairly recent issue. I’ll bet then, I hope, on a cancer pipping the post.
    Aside from degenerating hearing, weaker eyesight, occasional difficulty with stairs unless they have a banister, feeling faint if I get up too fast from a chair or bed and other minor difficulties, I’m not, they tell me with some surprise, in bad nick. There is, however, one last disadvantage, and not for those with a refined sensibility. For several years before my general physical degeneration I have been occasionally caught by an unexpected attack of violent diarrhoea. Among other places this happened twice in Liverpool, my home town, in a very primitive publictoilet on Exchange Street East station and, as was so often the case, I was just too late, and another time when staying at my dear Uncle Alan’s flat, but, worst of all, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I’d gone there after lunch with a friend but, once inside the front entrance, I knew the curse had come upon me. On asking, I discovered the gents was at the other end of the building, past about forty collections of Ming china and other exhibits. It was impossible (I was now desperate) to even contemplate trying to make it, so I dived, jumping from foot to foot and clenching my bottom, into the ladies. Too late even so, but luckily there was plenty of paper to clean up both me and the cubicle. I didn’t dare use the wash-basin, however, for fear of encountering a stern woman academic here to study Meissen hard porcelain, and taken short.
    I always try to cover my tracks as far as I can, but a full shower and change of clothing are hardly ever immediately available. After one disaster in Digby Fairweather’s partner’s car, I now, on Diana’s insistence, pay whichever member ofthe band is driving me ‘danger money’ and sit on a blanket or old towel.
    I have elsewhere (in Hooked , my fishing memoir) talked of the unsought laxative effect of wearing breast-waders. I have checked with other elderly fishermen and found much confirmation. This, too, explains why my father always pocketed a substantial wad of loo paper before going down to the river. I’ve taken, therefore, to wearing grown-up nappies held in place not by a pin or adhesive band but by a pair of strong but gossamer-like underpants. Since I’ve had