Contains strong language and adult content that some readers may find upsetting

i. BUSY DYING

At 08:44 British Summer Time on Friday 12 May 2017 a global cyberattack going by the name of WannaCry was launched upon a complacent and ill-prepared world by bad-actor or bad-actors unknown.

The WannaCry cryptoworm targeted computers and networks that were using the Microsoft Windows operating system. The worm captured the data and encrypted it so that the rightful owners of the data no longer had access. The WannaCry worm then demanded a ransom in Bitcoin to restore access to the data.

On a normal day I would have been interested in the WannaCry event and would have discussed it with friends during the day. On this day however I was unable to take an interest as I was busy dying.

By the time WannaCry was stopped in its tracks. a mere seven hours and nineteen minutes after it was launched, it had infected more than 300,000 computer networks in 150 countries. The cost of stopping the attack, fixing the problem, recovering the data plus other costs and lost service time plus the opportunity costs and ~ we must suppose ~ some ransom money paid, ran into billions of dollars. No one knows how many billions of dollars.

WannaCry was able to do what it did because it could propagate itself by infecting other computers without any help from humans. It did not have to wait for someone to open it or start to interact with it. No sooner had it infected one computer than it found a path to another computer and started to copy itself into the new target. It did this by using an exploit called EternalBlue.

An exploit is a another piece of software specifically designed to enable a bad actor to take control of computers or software belonging to someone else. The EternalBlue exploit had been developed by the United States National Security Agency (US NSA). Unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly the United States National Security Agency had crap security. EternalBlue was stolen from the US NSA by a group of sport hackers calling themselves the ShadowBrokers a month before the WannaCry attack.

The ShadowBrokers released EternalBlue onto the dark web. This meant that any potential bad actors were able to pick it up and weaponise it for their own malicious purposes.

Today it is widely accepted that it was the Democratic People's Republic of Korea ~ North Korea ~ that picked up Eternal Blue and turned it on the West. Malice aforethought on a global scale.

At the time that the ShadowBrokers stole the exploit EternalBlue, Microsoft released patches to be applied to their software to defend against the exploit. A surprisingly large group of organisations did not, however, apply the patches. Among the reasons given for not applying the patches were the users critical need to run their systems 24/7, lack of resources (people, hardware, money) and a fear that the patches would damage other, crucial, legacy applications.

Who then was to blame? Whoever it was they nearly killed me and, not unnaturally, I would like to know who to take to task.

ii THE BLAME GAME

Humankind’s need to find someone to blame
is ubiquitous, constant and eternal. 
Aurelia Pinchbeck ~ The Difference Engine. 2002

Clearly the United States National Security Agency are guilty of truly astonishing aggravated stupidity. They made a super-weapon or rather an engine that anyone could use to drive their own super-weapon but failed to lock the cupboard in which it was kept. We should not, however, blame them. They are no more stupid than the rest of us. If this sounds like condemning them with faint praise it’s because that’s exactly what it is. 

The Shadow Brokers who stole EternalBlue and put it on the dark web are just dim-witted children trying to get the attention of neglectful or absent parents. As a parent myself I find I am loath to blame either the children or the parents.

Microsoft are in the dock of course. If you supply a room-heater that bursts into flames and sets fire to a house full of sleeping children it is not sufficient to deliver a box full of fire extinguishers and send an email saying "fire extinguishers outside your door help yourself."

It is tempting to just turn on North Korea and blame them for everything. North Korea is a shitty regime, of course, led by a shitty totalitarian sociopath. It is a founder member of a club made up of a handful of nations that make the “free west” look like towering giants of moral probity, common sense, intelligence and good behaviour. No mean achievement. The North Koreans intended to disrupt the west and hurt the capitalist economies. They hoped to get a few billion in Bitcoin as the icing on their cake. It is pointless blaming them however. We might as well blame the chair leg for our pain when we stub a toe.

So then we get to those organisations that did not use the patches provided by Microsoft. They were either over stretched or not very bright. Quite possibly both. Blaming them would be like flogging the Donkey for farting in the cart driver’s face. If you sit behind a Donkey, farts are what you get. One such donkey organisation that did nothing with the Microsoft patches was the UK National Health Service.

The NHS is a UK government agency, funded from taxes, with the second largest payroll in the world. It has been so under-resourced by successive British governments that it cannot now deal with simple health related problems never mind the notional threat of global digital Armageddon. Those selfish, greedy and criminally inclined politicians who have voided their loathsome bodies on the National Health Service should be held responsible and their feet should be held to the fire without any hope that some nurse or doctor will come to salve their wounds.

This will not happen of course. Failed politicians and, as Enoch Powell pointed out, they will all be failures in their end, mostly find well paid employment in large and wealthy businesses where their skills at robbing, cheating and lying are much valued and attract large salaries backed by other benefits such as private health insurance.

Where was I? Oh yes. The search for someone to blame when our lives are disrupted or threatened is an utter waste of time. Even if the right people get the blame ~ and this is less common than good teeth in Glaswegians ~ they are rarely punished and both victims and perpetrators soon forget. Time folds in upon itself and in no time at all the politicians and business leaders are publishing their memoirs.

iii. THE BENCH MOUNTED PILLAR DRILL

At 08:44 on Friday 12 May 2017 as the first instance of the WannaCry virus was lighting up I was on the phone calling NHS 111 the non-emergency medical helpline operating in England, Scotland and Wales.

I was able to dial the number myself but so violent and fast was the onset of the viral attack that had me in its grip that before the end of the call I was unable to hold the phone to my ear. I was shivering so violently that Jim, my partner and the mother of my children, had to hold the phone for me as I described my symptoms to the doctor.

I explained to the doctor that twenty minutes before calling him I had been sitting on my bed feeling fine. I felt fine as I came downstairs and filled the kettle with water and set it to boil. By the time it had boiled, however, I was freezing cold and beginning to shiver. My symptoms were not quite like anything I had ever experienced before. Nevertheless, I assumed I was “going down with the flu.”

“Go back to bed” Jim said “and I’ll bring you a cup of tea and some paracetamol”

I have a clear memory of a loud, unrecognisable, slurring voice in a nearby room saying

 “NO….I’m really ill”.

I was right. I had septicaemia. Somewhere in my body, in my lungs perhaps or my brain or my abdominal organs, a virus or a bacterium or possibly a fungus had set up home. Now it was beginning to explore what mischief it could cause in its new accommodation. In all likelihood the infection was fairly humdrum and easy to treat. The problem was I had to stay alive while the treatment was delivered. Staying alive was not going to be easy as my immune system had lost the plot and was doing its best to kill me by closing-down a few organs and life critical processes.

Septicaemia is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Onset symptoms differ from patient to patient and often sound very like the symptoms of other, much more familiar and far less sinister, diseases. Influenza for example. In my case my first obvious symptom was that my body temperature fell off the edge of a cliff. I was freezing to death while all around me were pleasantly warm. Within thirty minutes, however, my temperature had rocketed to a seizure-inducing high. Fortunately for me the Doctor on NHS 111 got the diagnosis right first time.

 “ Have you got a car? ” he said.

“Yes” said Jim briskly, demonstrating the coolness and decisiveness engendered by five years of Pony Club .

“I want you to drive to the A&E department at Queen Mary’s Margate.” the doctor said. “I will send them an email telling them to expect you. Go now,…immediately....without delay....don’t wait for an ambulance … ”

I don't remember getting into the car. I don't remember very much about the drive to the hospital. Jim insists that I spent the whole journey giving her instructions on how to drive a car and which route to take.

A digital countdown sign in the Accident and Emergency waiting room announced in bright red digits that the current waiting time to be seen by a clinician was a little over six hours. Jim told the reception that the 111 doctor had sent them a message, they looked on their computer and, as they looked, the computer went down and the digital readout in the waiting area went off.

I collapsed into a chair and left Jim to deal with the problem. After a minute or two, with Jim on rising volume mode, we were ushered into an office where a senior nurse was triaging people who insisted they could not wait six minutes never mind six hours. By now I was beginning to hallucinate. The room boomed and crackled. The walls pulsed and throbbed. The people who spoke to me babbled nonsense and from far away. Unaccountably when I spoke to them, although I knew I was making perfect sense, they were unable to understand what I was saying.

I had experienced this sort of piercing clarity before but only by mixing large quantities of alcohol, recreational drugs and Red Bull. Now this clarity enabled me to understand that the nurse was the gatekeeper who held the keys to my survival. Her face loomed large. I was impressed by her skin which was flawless. I was annoyed with her for being so young.  She asked me a question. I knew that my life depended on my giving the right answer. She repeated the question. I remember thinking “Ha ha, is that the best you can do” and I remember opening my mouth to win the argument with a brilliant rhetorical flourish, as I so often do.

I do not remember stumbling and falling, speaking in tongues, weeping and ranting, trying to fight those who rushed to help me. Nor do I remember anything about the next thirty-six hours and very little about the thirty-six hours after that. I was “away” and might not be coming back.

It had taken less than one hundred minutes for me to collapse from rude good health to near death. Coincidentally these were the same hundred minutes it had taken for the North Koreans to trash the NHS computer systems.

A nice young doctor spoke to Jim about my condition. My temperature, he said, was very high. Could she tell him what had been going on in the hours before the onset of my illness.

“Well no, I can’t” she said, “he was asleep and so was I”.  The doctor seemed perplexed.

 “Is he going to die?” Jim said in a very small and wobbly voice.

.“No” the nice young doctor replied, “but if we don’t do something he will”.

The doctor meant well but the truth is he had no idea what he was up against and not much hope of finding out. As he spoke most of the computers and computer driven treatment systems and devices, which should have been deployed to save my life were being turned off. They would remain turned off for the next two or three days.

On a normal day the clinicians would have run a whole load of tests, identified both the type and location of the infection, then attacked it with a combination of treatments known to work against that specific infection. Today I could not even get checked-in as a patient so that my records could be accessed. Nor could I get an x-ray or a scan to check if the infection was in my lungs, in my heart or somewhere else.

On a normal day samples of my blood would have been sent to an on-site laboratory for analysis. The results of the analysis would then have been added to my central computer records where all involved would have been able to consult about my condition then determine and monitor my treatment. Any changes for better or for worse would have been flagged by the computer programme. But for now, the computers were down, the doctors were driving in the dark without head lights and in the A&E waiting room the bright red digital readout of predicted waiting time was off.

While Jim was pleading our case at the reception window I had slumped into a seat beside a man who had drilled right through the palm of his hand with a bench-mounted pillar drill. Unfortunately he had been unable to control his panic response and had pulled the drill up and out. It would have been better if he had released the drill bit from the chuck and brought the bit, still stuck in his hand, to the hospital. Failing that it would have been better if he had pushed the drill bit through his hand or if he had kept the drill running while he pulled the drill bit up and out. Either way it would have come out quite easily and without much compounding the injury already inflicted.

Unsurprisingly, however, he had stopped the drill. Then he pushed up the lever that would raise the drill with all the super-human adrenalin-boosted strength in his body. In doing so he pulled some of the small bones, flesh and sinew, that properly belonged inside his hand, out through the entrance wound. The drill-bit, perfectly shaped to grip the materials it had drilled through, also pulled a few large wooden splinters from the wood on which his hand had been resting out of the hand through the entrance wound along with the meat and gristle.

I observed this and then forgot it as my brain began to boil in its own juices. When I did remember it, some months later, I recognised that The Drilled Hand, like a well designed scientific experiment, provides a fine model with which to illustrate the dangers of aggravated stupidity and the even greater dangers in how we choose to deal with it.

It demonstrates just how easy it is to make a disastrous mistake, how easy it is to compound our first stupidity and how quickly and without warning this major shit can turn into an existential threat.

At the time of writing less than 750 people have made it into space. And yet the news this week is about the preparations that the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China are making to fight each other in space.

Who was to blame for the WannaCry debacle? Humankind was to blame. Humankind suffering as it does from faulty design and faulty manufacture. If you have a faith, you can complain to the big (wo)man upstairs.

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! says Hamlet. But Hamlet didn’t have Kim Jong Un, supreme leader of North Korea and general secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea in mind nor was he thinking of Donald Trump nor Xi Jinping nor did he and his acquaintances have easy access to a bench-mounted pillar-drill

iv. THE LOST WEEKEND

I surfaced once on Saturday. It was night. Later I would learn that I was in a critical care ward. There were six beds in a small room. The foot of my bed was about two metres from the foot of the bed that faced me across the ward. In my half-conscious state I felt that there were other people in the ward but I could not see them. My temperature-distorted world throbbed and popped. I wanted Jim and I wanted my children. I felt sorry for myself. Where was everyone? As far as I could ascertain my snivelling self-pity was playing out to an empty room.

I didn’t know it then but I had a half-litre bag of all-purpose antibiotic juice dripping into me through a stent in the back of my left hand, I had another one-litre bag of saline dripping into me through a stent in the back of my right hand. I had a catheter pushed up my willy into my bladder draining out the saline and the antibiotic juice once I had processed them and, as soon as the first two bags were empty and the third one was full, they were changed for new ones.

I was naked under a single sheet and an electric fan on a stand stood by the bed sweeping a cooling draft right and left across my fevered body night and day. The fan would be my faithful and tireless servant for the next four days. It seemed to me then and still does now an extraordinarily primitive solution to bringing down a high temperature. Like the Victorians and Edwardians plunging patients into a bath full of ice chunks when a fever threatened to kill them.

On Sunday morning, very early, a tiny nurse, from a country that faced onto the South China Sea came to take my blood and check my drips. I was awake but remained asleep. In my dream a swarm of insects, large ants or flies, tickled my left leg. They were nibbling at my thigh. They spoke to each other in soft chirring murmurs which came and went with a regular beat.

About three on Monday morning the lights came on without warning. I think I was already awake. A mob of clinical staff brought in a new patient. They put him in the bed facing me across the aisle. They moved quickly, spoke hardly at all, whispered when they did speak. Rapidly he was plugged in and wired up. He didn’t move as they shoved needles and tubes into him. They did not however plug him into the monitors. The monitors themselves needed a health check and some patching up before they could get back to beeping. 

The delivery men left as quickly and quietly as they had arrived taking the trolly with them. I dozed for what seemed like a few minutes. When I awoke I saw that it was morning though the ward seemed empty. My new roommate lay unmoving on his back and as silent as the grave. Again I slept and after what seemed like ten minutes I was woken by a different nurse to find that it was day.

“The Consultant is coming to see you this morning. I’ll give you a bit of a wash should I?” she said.

I didn’t answer, couldn't in fact, but she pulled the curtains around my bed and went ahead and sponged me down anyway. When she was finished, she called another nurse, the tiny one from earlier. Together they rolled me back and forth like a pale naked log while they changed the bottom sheet.

For a brief moment when I lay naked as they floated the fresh top-sheet in the air above my body a wonderful cooling breeze from the whirring fan played over me. When they had finished I said “thank you” and a weird croaky little voice repeated what I had just said. The nurses looked at each other.

“So! It does talk” the tall one said to the tiny one. They raised their hands above their heads and did a high five across the bed. As they left they pulled back my curtains. I was back or, at the very least, on my way. Across the room there was an old man. I remembered the silent delivery in the night.

“Not dead yet then” I thought and drifted off to sleep.

The spiders were tickling my leg again. They seemed to be passing opinions about me as though grazing on my leg was not enough of an insult. I woke up just in time to see the Consultant and the Consultant’s posse leaving the ward.

How do I know all this? How did I see it all? How can I remember it in such detail. I don’t, I didn’t, and I can’t. A month after I returned home Jim said something in passing about the first few days of my stay in hospital. It was only then that I realised that I had “lost” the first thirty-six hours completely. Months later, however, when I tried to write it all down, I found that my brain had recorded a random load of events and impressions and images. A shoebox full of badly framed and out of focus photographs, scribbled notes, till receipts and bus-tickets. With these I have done my best to make this reconstruction.

On Monday afternoon I awoke and it was day.  I had a raging temperature and, strangely, for the first time a raging thirst. There was silence in the little ward, a silence emphasised by the metronomic sighing of my fan. I lifted my head and looked across at the old man expecting to see an empty bed. Instead I saw that he was still there silent and unmoving, his sharp nose pointed heavenwards.

Another small man, much younger, was crouching over him as though checking for signs of life. He produced an aerosol can, shook it vigorously, and squirted a generous cushion of shaving foam into the palm of his left hand. For a moment or two he patted the foam onto the face and neck of the unconscious man. Then he produced a razor and with swift sure strokes, grasping pieces of the face to turn the head this way and that, stretching the skin taught, he shaved the man laid out before him.

When all the foam was gone he went up the ward and came back with a wet towel. Now he placed the towel over the man’s face and wiped the face clean. He worked slowly down the head from the forehead to the Adam’s Apple, carefully cleaning each feature, the eye sockets, the ears, the nostrils, the corners of the mouth, the now clean-shaven cheeks.

When all was done as it must be done and done a well as the moment demanded the barber leaned forward and kissed the old man on the forehead. Then I understood what I already knew, though I had never seen such a thing before. I was watching a loving and dutiful son preparing his father to meet his maker.

A huge bubble of emotion, a clotted sob of empathy, sympathy and self-pity filled my chest and throat threatening to escape. I hid from these emotions under my sheet. While I was down there I raised myself on my elbows and inspected my body. My willy was a tiny, pale, flaccid, unhappy tea-pot spout with a ribbon of white adhesive-tape around my right thigh keeping the catheter in place.

My left leg was hugely swollen and an angry red. I could see that it was covered in spidery handwriting. Later I would find out that these marks, words and numbers written in indelible marker on my fat, red leg were tracking the extent of the swelling.

The nurses had been checking the progress of the swelling each hour as it spread up my leg towards my groin. Later inspection of the annotated limb revealed a circle of black ink, about two inches across, just above my ankle. Next to the circle two words and two question marks were inscribed.

“INSECT BITE ??” the inscription read. A mosquito, it seemed, had done it’s level best to take me out.

v. THE PERMANENT WAVE

Later the old man’s daughter arrived. She was a handsome woman of about forty-five, with a generously proportioned figure and wearing a salt-and-pepper tweed Chanel Suit.  Her hair was dyed jet black and done up in what my mother would have called a permanent-wave. She carried a large handbag. Her face was powdered and rouged and her lipstick newly applied. She had a strong chin, plucked eyebrows and a fat but cute nose. The son, the barber, was not there. Parking the car, I supposed. She kissed the old man who still had not moved and sat in the chair beside the bed and for a moment there was peace.

Now an Orthodox priest entered upon the scene. He towered over everyone else in the room. His hair was long and greasy, his vast beard forked like a viper’s tongue. He wore a black cassock secured around his broad belly with a flat, wide, leather belt and around his neck an enormous silver cross on a chain.  Both he and the symbols of his office looked as though they would come in handy if, for example, an argument about Angles and pinheads were to develop into a fist fight.

As the priest entered the room, the daughter rose to her feet walked towards him and blocked his way. They were only a few feet away from me. I feigned unconsciousness. A hissing argument ensued. I am fairly certain that the language was Greek.

I speak no Greek but I was sure that the priest was there to administer the last rights. From time to time he held up a small Gladstone bag demonstrating, I felt certain, that he had arrived with all the necessary equipment. The daughter however would have none of it. Once again my lack of Greek was no barrier to understanding. The old man she pointed out had not been religious and had made a specific request that when his time came the priest should be kept at bay.

They argued on, neither gaining an advantage. The son arrived, he and his sister went out into the corridor to talk. Before they left the daughter pointed to an imaginary line she had drawn on the floor. She spoke sharply to the priest and he raised his hand as though in benediction.

The moment the brother and sister were out of the door, however, the priest took a very real step across the imaginary line and approached the motionless old man. Opening his bag he extracted a few objects.  I could not see what they were. He placed them on the chest of the man in the bed. Now he began to rearrange these objects while muttering a sort of song. Almost immediately the man’s children returned with a senior nurse, much older, much bigger and much heavier than the high-fiving bed-bath crew who had earlier disturbed my sleep.

The daughter let out a strangled growl. In a calm voice Big Nurse said

“Young man I’m afraid I must ask you to leave. Please. It will be better for all concerned if you leave voluntarily.”

Right on cue two retired army sergeants entered the room. They were, I guessed, in their early fifties. One, slightly taller than the other, had facial features that had been rearranged by someone wielding a three-pound lump-hammer, or possibly a cast-iron skillet. They were dressed not in camouflage battledress but in smart grey warehouse-coats with magenta pipping and the word “SECURITY” embroidered in magenta thread on the left breast pocket.

One can only imagine what these two men had seen and done in their professional lives. Northern Ireland, Iraq, Helmand Province, Margate on a Saturday night. Nevertheless the sight of the seven foot priest dressed in black, bearded like the pard and clutching a metal crucifix the size of a felling axe stopped them in their tracks. There was a moment’s pause and then the priest’s shoulders sagged.

“At easy Gentlemen” he said sounding like a character from a Gerald Durrell book “there is no workings for you here.” He packed his props back into his bag and left. As he passed the two children, he stopped.

“God will forgive you” he said in English facing the daughter, raising his voice so that the whole ward would hear.

The woman with the permanent-wave and the Chanel suit said something in Greek that sounded like “gama-say”. I thought I knew exactly what she had said.

The priest was, of course, just trying to help the dying man avoid the worst consequences of sin. Most of us don't believe in sin. If we did, we wouldn’t do it. The wages of sin are, after all, unacceptably high. Purgatory, eternity, all that stuff. But the word sin is just another word for bad behaviour employed by the religiously inclined. And the religiously inclined often classify as “bad” those behaviours which the rest of us find unexceptional and harmless.

Take coveting thy neighbour's spouse for example. In my own experience coveting thy neighbour’s spouse is entirely harmless and often pleasurable. Coveting thy neighbour’s spouse was, much like gin and tonic, invented solely to make tolerable otherwise insufferably boring social events.

Whereas, fucking thy neighbour's spouse ~ ruining two marriages, hurting the children, leaving all concerned in tears, having to crawl miles on broken glass to appease thine own spouse, and finding that after all this upset, weeping and broken glass, that you just cannot get the smell of thy neighbour's spouse's navel out of your mind and, as it turns out, never will be able to, however long and eventful is the life that you are afforded ~ that, my friend, is terminal stupidity. We simply should not do it. Nor should we do it again. Nor should we judge others who do. Yet we do and we do and we do as I did and do.

vii. THE SOUL OF THE NEW MACHINE

On Monday late morning I was moved to a small general ward with ten beds. The computers and the computer driven kit were back on-line. The IT people all over the country had not been home for the weekend, patches had been applied, fire-walls had been mended and all was well. Until the next time.

My catering-pack-sized bags of non-specific magic juice had been substituted with smaller bags containing a concoction designed specifically to deal with whatever it was I had. The new bags were smaller, the contents were the colour of weak tea and I only got a new one every three hours. I was off the danger list. Nevertheless I was still hot and my biggest fan came with me to my new home.

Someone had stolen my sponge bag during the move. It was made of soft Italian leather, was an expensive gift from a former lover and,  much like a love affair, had a cleverly concealed hook that allowed you to hang it up behind a door at home awaiting your next adventure to foreign parts.

I had nearly died. All around me others were at death’s door. Some of these were facing, at the last, their own all too human failings, being forced to judge themselves or suffering the judgement of others. I, on the other hand, was making a fuss about a sponge bag.

My new ward was empty, on stand-by, ready to power-up when demand required it. I was the first in and so I got the bed farthest from the door. On Monday evening I was alone in the ward. A single student nurse kept an eye on me from the nurses station by the exit. She was, I would soon discover, revising for her exams. I asked her if she was lonely. She said she preferred being on her own.

What about the other nurses? I said, “not get on with them?”

“Not really” she said.

A senior nurse came to remove my catheter.  The Lonely Nurse was summoned to observe the procedure. The senior nurse was a large and handsome West Indian woman of about fifty-five. Taking a firm hold of my shrinking pride with her left hand she griped the catheter in her right and in one smooth, gentle, motion pulled what seemed like a yard and half of tubing out of my willy. 

“There we are Mr Tibbetts” she said “now you can pee in a bottle which will, of course, be much easier if Nurse remembers to bring you one.

She stood at the bottom of my bed while the Lonely Nurse trotted off to fetch me a bottle. We talked about cricket. She was utterly charming. She had a quiet and natural authority and a sense of humour. The West Indies Test side were coming to England for a three match series in the late summer. She was pessimistic about the upcoming tour. They would, she said, struggle to win a match never mind win the series.

I told her that I had seen two of the matches in the 1984 “Blackwash” series when Joel Garner tore the heart out of England.

“You saw the Big Bird play?” she said

“I did, twice, Edgbaston and The Oval. At the Oval the crowd started singing before the first ball and didn’t stop until after the last. What a bowler…...'“

“And so handsome” she said, and half way through the word handsome she dropped her voice half an octave and added a growl. We both laughed.

You’re far too young to remember him in 84’ I said.

“I’ve got nothing for you Mr Tibbetts so you can stop it with your flattery, I was 19 and I had a poster of him on my bedroom wall. I used to have a little torch that I kept under my pillow so that I could lie in bed at night and put the spotlight on him.”

As she said this she did a little pantomime, producing an imaginary pen-torch from her pocket and shining it on the wall by my bed. She gazed up at the wall with a hand on her heart and fluttered he eyelids. She looked so young my heart missed a beat.

There was a commotion at the end of the ward. A porter was standing holding the head rail of an occupied bed while a nurse and a youngish man in theatre scrubs, talked to the Lonely Nurse.

“I knew it was too good to last. I had better go. I’ll see if I can find your sponge bag”

“How do you know about my sponge bag?” I said.

“Everyone saying you called Mr Alderdyce, the senior Consultant a thief to his face”

“ I have never even met Mr Alderdyce ”

“Shame, he need a good telling off” and she strode off down the ward.

By ten o’clock the following morning, a Tuesday, eight of the ten beds were occupied. My new neighbour was called Phil. I was still naked beneath my sheet and the curtain between his bed and mine were still drawn across. I lay on my bed and exposed myself to my fan. It didn’t miss a beat seemingly unaroused by the sight of my naked body. I myself felt vaguely aroused though there was no physical evidence to be seen. Phil was chirpy and flirted with the nurses.

“You back again Phil?”

 “Mister Bland to you, cheeky chops.”

Mr Alderdyce and his posse dropped by. The senior quack was a short, slim, man with thinning silver hair and half-moon, silver-wire, spectacles. The posse were all dressed in white coats and had stethoscopes around their necks. The boss wore a three-piece pinstripe suit and a gold chain with a second pair of spectacles dangling around his neck. Just in case we failed to notice that he was the boss. The team was followed by the ward sister who almost certainly knew more than all of them put together. She kept her distance, carried an armful of papers, was hardly consulted and only spoke when spoken to.

The posse stopped at the foot of my bed. The suit did not speak. The ward sister handed him my folder. He made a pretence of reading.

 “He can go home tomorrow” he said and tuned on his heel and left.

At the time I thought this behaviour was because I had complained about the stolen sponge bag. But now I have changed my mind. In my entire visit to the hospital no one ever asked me what I thought was the problem. No one ever told me what was going on. People stood around and discussed me and from what they said I picked up a little about my condition. To this day I have never had a diagnosis. When I next visited my GP I mentioned my excursion to the shores of the Styx. He seemed surprised. There were no notes on his computer.

“Well that’s no good” he said, “I’ll get on to them ….” But the next time I went in for my annual prescription review, I saw another Doctor and I had other things on my mind. 

The whole process, the arrogance, keeping the patient in the dark, treating the patient as though he wasn’t there was a cliché, a cinematic trope from the 1950s. Carry on Up Your Own Arse Doctor. All the doctors involved, from the spotty faced students to the skinny arsed septuagenarian, must have worked very hard to maintain this anachronistic charade in a world with digital warfare, off-planet excursions and EternalBlue exploits.

As I write these words the National Health Service is struggling to survive. Jim does pro-bono work for an organisation that lobbies parliament for the changes they deem necessary to ensure the survival of the NHS. Many doubt that it will survive. If it does survive it won’t be because so many of the senior clinical staff didn’t do their damnedest to kill it off.

vii THE SEA

The Ward Sister came to see me and removed the stents from the back of my hands. The bruises were already turning from blue to green to yellow. She taped a small ball of cotton wool over each tiny puncture mark. She was plump, blond, blue-eyed, stern and slightly scary.

“The doctor will come tomorrow morning with a prescription. Don’t leave without it. If someone does not bring it to you by the time you are ready to leave, come to the nurses station and ask. Am I being clear?

I was going home in the morning. I was, I thought, already an outsider. The rest of my ward mates would be here after I had gone. I would never see any of them again. I had escaped. I had been found guilty and imprisoned but then unexpectedly, inexplicably and probably undeservedly released

Phil had a steady stream of visitors. I earwigged everything that I could. It was like a play on Radio 4. I had to stop myself leaning forward and adjusting the volume. I could have flicked back the curtain and watched the whole thing in hi-def.

The children came first. They were all grown-up, more or less. There were three of them, a boy and two girls. The boy, George, was the oldest. He sounded as though he was about thirty. The oldest girl, Sally, worked in a bank. Her future was uncertain. Little Mo, the youngest of the three, was still at school. Much younger than the other two. An afterthought.

It was clear from their conversation that Phil had been admitted to hospital this time for a condition that had hospitalised him before and was going to see him off sooner or later. Probably sooner and possibly this time. George started to cry.

Phil’s wife Maureen, Mo, came after lunch. The food had been a triumph of awfulness. It was my first meal in five days. Jim had offered to bring me some supplies. Now I regretted turning her down. Ramachandran, the ward porter, came to collect the dishes and noticed that I had refused the ale-battered carpet under-lay that smelled of dog farts, the chips like white slugs and the fluorescent green mushy peas that looked as appetising as fluorescent green mushy peas.

I had however eaten all of the rice pudding. Without comment Ramachandran took my dishes away and returned with two extra rice puddings. When I thanked him he patted me on my arm. As I ate my second and third pudding I listened to The Afternoon Play.

Phil and Maureen were still living together. When she arrived I heard her embrace him, she was warm and concerned and caring but, I thought, a little bit detached. I felt that, perhaps, all this was too familiar for her to get exercised about, death and all that stuff. She had been here before. Phil complimented her on what she was wearing.

“M&S” she said, “they’re having a sale”.

 They talked about the children. Phil described their visit. Then he said that George had started to cry.

“"Oh dear” said Mo, all motherly sympathy.

“Who does he get that from?” Phil asked in an unpleasant bullying tone.

 “It’s nothing” said Maureen, “he just loves his Dad. It’s always the boys that cry. You know that Phil”

 “I haven’t been a very good father,” said Phil.

 “I don’t know what makes you say that” said Maureen.

They talked about the house building business which Phil ran with his friend Stevie.

 “Stevie will see you all right” said Phil, “He’s one of the good ones.”

 “I know” said Maureen, “I’ve known him since I was five”

There was something heroically ordinary about Phil and Maureen’s life, I thought.

Quite late in the evening Stevie came to visit. They talked fast and in restricted code. They were building seven, detached, four-bedroomed executive family homes on a sloping, brownfield site, not far from Chatham. They had bought the site for a song and cleaned out the toxic chemicals themselves. They had sold four of the houses off the drawings. They were going to repay the financing ahead of schedule, avoiding one of the interest payments.

“Lovely jubbly” said Stevie. It was clear from what they said that they had been best of friends since they were children. After a while Phil said,

“I’ve left the house to Ashala”. There was a long pause.

“You’ve done what?” Stevie said.

“I promised her I would leave her the house. So…… I have left it to her in my will.”

“You’ve left the house to Ashala?”

 “Yeah”

 “You fucking prick!”

 “Stevie please.”

 “I thought all that was finished ……. years ago.”

 “Yeah well…..you know…..I love her. Always have done. You know that”

 “I know but what about Maureen?” said Stevie.

 "Oh she’ll be alright."

 "Have you told her?"

“No …well… that’s the thing see….that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You’ve got to tell her Stevie, tell her before the reading of the will."

"Fuck off"

 "Please Stevie."

 “You want me to tell Mo that you have been fucking a ….. fucking an… Ethiopian blackie….all these years and you’ve left her the house…

“Well I don’t ….I don’t want it to come as a shock see….

“Oh for fuck’s sake Phil…”

 “Well… she and the kids will get all my money, my half of the business and all that stuff, the investments and the money in err… in Seville ..she knows that you know how to get it and Ashala doesn’t even know it exists.”

“Oh well that’s a fucking relief ”

 “Come on Stevie”

 “I won’t do it,” said Stevie

 “What?”

“I won’t do it… I won’t do it Phil, I won’t have anything to do with any of this. I always knew you were a bit of a cunt… you don’t deserve that woman” and Stevie got up and left.

I sat in frozen silence terrified that Phil would hear me listening. The fan went on whirring back and forth. I wondered which of the two women, the “Essex whitey” or the “Ethiopian blackie” Phil didn’t deserve.

Lust is a deadly virus that stops the brain. And those who prescribe a cold shower or a herbal purge or, God forbid, prayer as a panacea are kidding themselves.

On Wednesday morning I had a shower, washed my matted hair and got dressed. I tightened my belt to the last hole but when I stood up my trousers fell down. I sat on my bed and settled myself to wait for Jim to come and get me. The nurses pulled the curtains back and there was Phil sitting up in bed. He looked like he had had a very bad night. His skin was grey and there were huge, dark, bags beneath his eyes.

“Hello.” I said.

“Going home are you?” said Phil.

“Yeah…..”

I found it hard to look at him. Most of us behave unspeakably badly while under the influence of what the French call “amour fou”. Phil, however, had set a new benchmark for betrayal and then arranged to conveniently die before he had to face the consequences.

“Any visitors this morning Mister Bland?” a nurse asked.

“I’m not sure” Phil croaked.

I sat looking at the floor hoping that Jim would come and rescue me.  Ramachandram came with a trolly and took away my fan.

“You won’t be needing this where you’re going” he said with a wide smile. I thanked him “for everything”.

“You take care Mr Tibbetts” he said and left

Phil seemed to fall asleep. I checked my phone for news of my lift. Phil suddenly made a choking noise. He seemed to be struggling for breath. My first thought was to call a nurse but when I looked down the ward I saw the cause of his breathlessness. Ghosting down the ward towards us was one of the most strikingly beautiful people I have ever seen. Tall, languid, elegant, with an imperial nose and a wide and noble forehead. Her coffee coloured skin glowed as though burnished by a whole spring day spent walking in sunshine. Her hair was done up in cornrows and braids, the braids down to her shoulders woven through with coloured beads and silken ribbons. A figure out of myth, a legend come to life, a fully paid-up princess of the Royal blood, Andromeda rising. The whole ward stopped to watch her and fell silent as she passed.

I went to wait in the hospital departure lounge. I was afraid that if I stayed I would call out in horror at what I might overhear next. The departure lounge was a cold and cheerless room utterly bereft of human comfort, situated at the far end of a featureless concrete corridor, designed by a cunning and talented psychopath, where those who had survived the ordeal of getting better could die while waiting to be taken home by an ambulance that never came. On the advice of my doctor I was not going to wait for the ambulance.

This facility, I thought, might soon serve as a memorial to the short life and early death of a dream. A plaque on the wall would read:

Here died the best public healthcare in the world, gone for good despite the best efforts of the people who worked here. Killed off by the shitty morals and staggering selfishness of successive generations of Tory politicians who foresaw huge profits for themselves ~ and their old friends from Eton or Oxford ~  if only they could sell the NHS to the Americans.

I sat for an hour or so puzzling over Phil and his behaviour. I felt that the rewards he had enjoyed while alive were in every way disproportionate and unfair. I was certain that there was no hell awaiting him. In fact I was certain there was no afterlife at all. So there was only his brief spell on earth during which he might be held to account. Phil’s only talent was a boundless selfishness augmented by a lack of a moral compass. His reward for being himself was financial and sexual success on a scale which must have been beyond his wildest imaginings and which would have kept many (perhaps most) men in wet-dreams for the rest of their lives.

I envied him his rewards. His stash of money hidden in Spain. His Ethiopian princess. His loyal and tolerant wife. His best friend who, I felt certain, loved him enough to forgive him and return to accept the task he had refused. I even envied him his terminal illness, a Get Out of Jail Free card in the Monopoly game of life.

I had judged and condemned Phil and now I envied him. It was, to put it mildly, confusing. It was all the more confusing because I had failed so often on my own journey to keep my dick in my trousers. I had, it was true, made many people happy because, as one enthusiastic lover explained to me, I did all the things that other people only dreamed about and this was liberating to many who got caught up in my slip-stream.

I could take no credit for making others happy, however, for I made them happy by scorning society’s norms not because I was a free-wheeling adventurer but because I was an arrogant shit who thought the rules were there for other people. Little people. And it wasn’t that I had bravely and romantically thrown away my moral compass but because I had never been issued with one in the first place.

I was troubled by Phil because he provided me with a measuring stick with which to measure my own failings. My eves-dropping from behind the arras had been involuntary and as soon as the details of his life began to strike too close to where I lived I had run away. 

The Greeks also made me uncomfortable. They had convictions, convictions they thought were worth fighting for and these convictions not only provided them with a road plan for their own behaviour but also made them willing to sacrifice promised rewards, heaven and the comforts of belief and a church. It was possible they were just as badly behaved as I was but, it seemed to me, they had been clever and made a better deal with life.

On Tuesday night, after the rush of arrivals, when the whole ward was bedded down, the Lonely Nurse came to see me. Phil was asleep, nevertheless she pulled the curtain between us closed leaving the curtain at the foot of the bed open. The bed across from me was empty. She stood at the bottom of my bed with her left hand behind her back, she glanced down the ward to her right towards the nurses station and waved with her right hand. She turned back and stood quietly as though waiting for me to pay attention.

“They’ve gone to get something to eat.”

“Don’t you eat?”

“They’ll bring me something back”. Silence returned.

“Good day? Bad day”?

“Good day” she said and with a flourish produced my spongebag from behind her back.

“ Ta dahh” she said holding her arms out wide and curtseying.

“You found it” She glanced to her right again and then stepped smartly into the enclosed space beside my bed.

“It was in the Critical Care ward office all the time” she said and laughed.

“Thank you. It was a present.” I said

“So you said”. There was a pause of no more than two beats and she put the sponge bag on the foot of my bed then put her hand underneath my top sheet.

“Everything all right?” she asked. She gave a gentle squeeze.

“ Yes….yes I think so.”

“ My exam has been postponed” she said.

“Oh really, why’s that?” I was having trouble focussing on the conversation and in controlling my breathing.

“ Their computers are still out of action”

“ Well you’ll have some more time to revise”

“Yes, that’s right, every cloud has a silver lining.”

We made small talk until I was done which was hardly time enough for me to ask her where she was from and had she always wanted to be a nurse. (“Whitstable” and “No”) She withdrew her hand and went to look down the ward then turned to face me at the foot of the bed.

“ I have to go”

“I know” I said. Her faced twisted

“ Remember me” she said and left.

-:-

As we drove home I asked Jim how the children were. She said she hadn’t spoken to them.

“It all happened so quickly” she said “and I’ve been terribly busy.”

I told myself that I understood why she hadn’t called the kids and that I was glad that she hadn’t. As it turned out I hadn’t needed a shave from my loving son nor a fierce defence against the Church from my loving daughter. So, there had been no need to alarm them.

“Let’s not go home.” I said. “Let’s go down to the bay and walk along the front.”  

“If that’s what you’d would like to do” said Jim “Are you sure you are up for it?”

I was certain that I was up for it. We walked along the sea-front down in the bay almost every day and when the kids were small had spent countless hours watching them poke around in the rock pools or, when the tide was in and the sea was calm enough, turn blue with cold as they threw themselves repeatedly into the sea’s freezing embrace.

Now, as we crested the great, white, chalkstone wave at the top of the cliff  ~ the last of England ~ and began the switchback descent to the bay, Jim called out

“What do we say when we see the sea?” and laughed.

This question was the first part of a call and response riff I had created for the children when they were very small.

“What do we say when we see the sea” I would call out as the sea came into view and the children would sing out “ Yipeeeeeeee”.

Now, as Jim tried her best to jolly me back into what passes for “normal” life, I found myself unable to answer the question I had myself asked repeatedly of others.

I was exhausted, of course, and I had had a real fright but that was not the problem. I had been given a ring-side seat so close to the lives of others that real sweat and real blood had splattered over my well-fed and over-privileged face. Far too close for comfort. Not only too close to Phil and Stevie and Mo and the old Greek with his dutiful son and his beautiful daughter with her folded arms and her permanent wave and her stubborn chin but also too close to the lonely (but not so forgetful) nurse and the redundant Orthodox priest and the pin-striped surgeon so far up his own arse he could see daylight above and the Ethiopian princess reincarnated as a courtesan to a house-builder in Margate and the man who had drilled a small neat hole through the back of his hand and been unable to stop himself turning it into a gaping wound, waiting and waiting, on and on, for a stopped-clock to start again and catch up with the here and the now.

What do we say when we see the sea?

“Look! There are people swimming and all of them are much further out than they thought and ~ as a different Stevie said ~ “not waving but drowning”.