Doctor, Doctor

I didn’t write a blog last week as my wife and I have been playing doctors and nurses. And before you get carried away with some fantasy involving bed baths and visits to the Anne Summers and Victoria’s Secret outlet stores, I mean that my daughter has had pneumonia and we’ve been mopping her fevered brow and her bedroom floor.

Getting any of our local doctors to come and visit this week has been a nightmare as they only come out for old people, or so they say. In the end, and under protest, a lady doctor came, demanded an X ray, pronounced pneumonia and antibiotics, and then reminded us that she would not come back for my teenage daughter, no matter how sick, but only for an old, infirm, patient. I’m not sure where we’re supposed to find one, or perhaps she was looking at me.

But the thing she fails to understand is that old people aren’t at home waiting for doctors. They’re all at work. News on pensions this week means that we’re all going to have to be employed till we’re old and incontinent with whiskery ears and fluffy bits missed by our razors and eyesight. Pensions look set to be postponed later and later in life as yet another politician said this week that we will all have to wait till we’re in our Seventies before we can retire.

So now that no one can be ageist and get rid of staff because of age, who is going to gently tell us when we’re no longer up to the job?

Am I going to see pensioners playing rugby or football for Scotland? Arguably, of course, results may improve. Will we have someone on a zimmer frame going for the Olympic pole vault gold medal? Will Joan Rivers enter beauty contests and Richard Attenborough play Braveheart 2?

The thing about getting older is that you get odder too. Who doesn’t know loads of people of a certain age who are slightly off centre? They call it “speaking their mind” and I often find myself roaring them on, delighted that they don’t care what people think of them. But, in the work place?

Part of playing the game of Work is biting your tongue. When someone messes up or spills coffee over your desk, for the sake of a calm working environment you bite your tongue and shrug it off, don’t you? It won’t be the same if you tell your colleague that you’ve missed a deadline and he shouts back “you young people don’t know you’re born. Bring back hanging and national service, and by the way you should be wearing a vest in this cold weather”.

And fancy going to see an old dentist whose dentures are looser than a skeleton’s waistband? His hand will be shaking so much that your teeth will rattle. And just imagine the reading material in his waiting room. There are only so many back copies of Gardener’s World and People’s Friend I can cope with.

Although I’m way off retiral age, I found a strange side effect of getting older this week. I discovered that I have become a goody goody. I have always hated people telling me what to do and I have ritually rebelled, often realising within minutes what a stupidly embarrassing thing I’d done. But this week I surprised myself by doing something odd and experiencing a strange feeling that I had to look up in the dictionary. Apparently it’s called “maturity”.

A female friend of mine who is Polish asked me for a favour. She has been offered a job doing security at the Olympics but needs to prove she has been living here for five years. She’s one year short so asked if she could give my name and number, telling the authorities that she cleaned my house for the year in question. Now it’s not that I think she’s a secret terrorist or drug smuggler, but it would be wrong wouldn’t it? It would be a lie, so I said “No”, which for a rebel like me is a big step.

So now I am officially “mature”, which is fine. I’m supposed to be grown up now and leave childish things behind. I guess the next stop is old age.

It may mean I’ll get a doctor to visit me a little bit quicker.