Poorly Bad

(from 2014)

There was a famous radio program that ran for over fifty years – Alistair Cooke’s “Letter from America.” I decided that I would rival this for my more than two weeks in the States with Occasional’s “Letter from America.”

Then I got sick! Now I have always boasted to the world that I have extremely good health. That I hardly ever get sick. Huh – well I’ve well and truly blown that line now. I came to America, and did I get sick – as we sometimes say in the UK “sick as a dog, sick as a parrot, poorly bad...”

It started on the train down to Pittsburgh. I feel asleep feeling good and woke up feeling like death warmed over.

There followed two days of hectic travel around four graveyards (Historians will have to work out why it was four) and numerous other historical sites. That did not improve my condition. In a state of delirium I interrogated my increasingly concerned hosts while scrabbling around a pyramid and filling clipboards with pages of notes, which I only hope I can understand when I can get back to them. What helped research was that two of my companions actually owned graves on the key site in question, so I got the real story. The big downer was that the cemetery owner – who apparently comes from Britain – was not there! He has seen off inquiries in the past, but I was going to try a fellow countryman’s charm offensive... As you do. And he wasn’t there. Six thousand miles to see him and he was out! So I will give my cohorts detailed instructions on what to say when they see him, and try another letter. He didn’t respond to my last one. Anyone would think that all he wants to do is make money by selling graves and monumental masonry, and is sick to death of dodgy historians...

And then it was time to give a talk to about 150 people, as already mentioned on this blog. That write-up was completely honest, but just omitted the awkward fact that I had to cling onto the rostrum for support throughout and whisper into a closely positioned mike. Since they had no idea what I might have sounded like – alas, they will never now hear my Judge Rutherford impersonation – and since the soft delivery (a polite way of putting the problem) suited the subject, it was OK. A certain anonymous poster has described elsewhere on this blog his sympathy for Mrs O who has to hear this stuff time and time again... Actually, I will have you know that much was specially prepared for America, and her main concern was that I didn’t entertain the audience by taking a header into the front row in mid sentence.

It didn’t happen.

But things didn’t improve when I reaching New Jersey. For a start Brits and Americans take their medication in different packaging. At home I might have had dinky little tablets, in America I was offered what appeared to be a suppository for a rather large horse. This apparently was to be taken orally. Yeah. Sure. And I then I compounded my problems by coughing loudly while navigating a particularly unfriendly escalator with an oversize suitcase at Newark and the result was – well, er, painful! For the next two days there was a standard four-move ritual interminably replayed.

Cough.

Loud yelp of pain.

Occasional does impersonation of dance move made famous by Michael Jackson.

Mrs O says quietly “try not to do that....”                    

So when she is finally sure I am not likely to die on her, off she goes on entertainment packages with the friends, and I stay glumly in someone’s apartment, trying to sleep and watching American TV.  American TV – that’s another subject! My experience obviously is limited but it seems to comprise of numerous advertisements for strange medicines to deal even stranger diseases, with a list of contra-indications so long and so severe that no one in their right mind would ever try the stuff. And they all ended with the potential finality of “sudden death.” For variation there was the other side of the coin - advertisements for firms specialising in medical negligence claims! Yup – you could sue, sue, sue, or if a recipient of “sudden death” perhaps your relatives could.

And on occasion, slipped in between the ads, was a rare slither of program.

Anyhow, I recovered sufficiently to struggle to my convention, which was great, apart from spending the whole time in the “Elderly and Infirm” section. That’s not a rite of passage I aspire to. And then finally, in the last two days, our friends in Manhattan hired a vehicle and we did all the things I’d missed the week before, before unloading my remains at JFK airport for the return home. That really rescued everything – although I still don’t currently feel like leaping tall buildings at a single bound, or changing the course of mighty rivers...

The biggest bummer of being sick is being left with no voice. I croak at Mrs O and she says “Pardon?” And I am coming back to the UK to spend a weekend in a muddy field and sing at a folk festival. As you do, As I do. Well, perhaps as I did.

I can see me having a really merry weekend just thumping a bodhran.

Whoopee...