In Good Company: The Right Words
...It surprises me how many patients leave their doctor’s surgery without an answer to the pertinent question: ‘What’s wrong with me, doc?’ I always feel better if my illness has a name, especially if I cannot pronounce it....
Enid Blackburn confessed to never being able to find the right words.
‘Mum, what are veins made of?’ a typical breakfast question fired by my 11-year-old daughter. ‘Oh, chewing gum,’ the first answer to surface, is not suitably lucid. What are they made of anyway? Perhaps a handful pulled from my nearest limb would satisfy her curiosity. I pour forth an imaginative description using aids like ‘spaghetti’ or ‘tubes of muscle.’ She smiles ‘Don’t you know?’
Knowing all the answers is an art I never mastered. The other day my hairdresser told me I had a nice chin. Like Mark Twain I can live for two months on a good compliment. ‘Have I really?’ What an observant chap! ‘No you haven’t – I’m only joking,’ was his reply. Lesson one, never question flattery, merely be thankful.
I like the answer produced by Lord Snowdon when he appeared on Mike Parkinson’s show. Mike was dithering around the question of finance. ‘Er – Lawd Snudden, I believe you were offered quite a considerable sum . . .’ he ventured. Lord Snowdon quickly blocked this particular channel with his smouldering reply, ‘Yes, I bet you do!’
Oh, to be mistress of the withering retort or to develop the degree of abstruseness which enables politicians to bury all questions under a cloud of last year’s statistics. ‘How can we end unemployment? Well let’s take a look at last year’s statistics.’
It surprises me how many patients leave their doctor’s surgery without an answer to the pertinent question: ‘What’s wrong with me, doc?’ I always feel better if my illness has a name, especially if I cannot pronounce it. I learned not to enlighten the medical profession with my own diagnosis when my first born was three. ‘She’s got measles,’ I greeted our physician with when he came to visit (this was when they did). I don’t think he ever forgave me.
I can never find the right words to release the clutches of the zealous sales assistants who guard the changing cubicles in dress shops. How does one exit gracefully without buying? The trials I undergo in the curtained cube – rehearsing my get away. ‘Too big, madam?’ and like Tommy Cooper she’ll produce a smaller size from behind her back. Perhaps if I act deaf or could have been suddenly struck with facial paralysis that makes speech impossible?
I have already performed my struck deaf act on two occasions. It takes the nerve of J R Ewing. The first was when my dog did a whoopsie on an elderly lady’s clean path she was sweeping it at the time. Looking straight ahead I continued pulling the other end of the lead and tried to look deaf. Barbara Woodhouse would have been proud.
The other occasion was one Christmas when I sat pretending to read a newspaper while to my left an angry refuse man stood tapping his collecting tin on the window. He could see me quite plainly, but playing deaf seemed less painful than confessing I was broke.
The paper was a mistake actually. Had I not been reading it I could have pretended I was blind, too. Who knows, he might have left me a tip!
