Were You Saved?

After two appointments the same Friday morning at St Peter’s hospital I returned home to find I’d missed a call. This was to inform me of details of a further appointment. Monday morning there was written confirmation of the appointment. What service.

I mentioned this to a group of people, saying how thankful I am for medical intervention. This started a rather strange discussion and as a result many of us knew that, but for medical intervention, we would not be here.

We take so much for granted. My mother-in-law died when my husband was 18-months-old of complications caused by gallstones. That wouldn't happen today.

A friend lost his young brother to measles in the 1940s and I had a school friend blinded by the disease. That wouldn't happen today. Or it wouldn't if people would get their children vaccinated.

I remember the Salk vaccine to protect me from polio, which raged when I was a teenager. No longer.

I might well have lost a daughter and her child when the baby was breech. That is no longer such a dangerous problem.

Here’s a pub quiz question for you: What was the name of the most important cow in history?

I'll tell you – she was Blossom and the word vaccine is derived from the Latin for cow: vacca.

And how brave of Edward Jenner to try to defeat the dreaded smallpox by using cowpox blisters from the hands of Sarah Nelmes, the milkmaid who caught it from Blossom. In Jenner’s time smallpox killed around 10% of the population.

Apart from vaccinations there are other things which have saved us: clean air and clean water.

Someone once asked me what I would not wish to live without. These days the answer might well be a phone. My reply then was water on tap. Yet another thing we take for granted. But it was not so very many years ago, around 1854, that cholera-infected water in a public pump in London killed many.

The Clean Air Act of 1956 came in just as I was starting to work in London. It came about principally in response to the Great Smog of 1952.

Home from work I would brush my hair and soot would fall from it. No longer.

Yes, we all owe much to medical intervention.

Sad Sunday

We were chatting over coffee when someone said she found Sundays sad.

Surely Blue Monday is supposed to be the saddest day of the year? Not in her book. Blue Monday is reckoned to be the third Monday of January, when all the fun and excitement of Christmas and the New Year is over.

All that is left is a hole in the bank balance, an enlarged waist measurement, and a pile of laundry now that all the Christmas/New Year guests have departed. The weather is miserable. The mornings are dark. The nights are long. Empty nest syndrome takes over.

But Sad Sunday in Summer? When the weather is fine? Well, at least the days are long. Evidently so – and partly for the same reason that Blue Monday is Blue: no fun and excitement. The ladies to whom I was chatting were all widowed with children living a some distance away.

“You see cars draw up on Sunday and a whole family get out to have a great Sunday lunch. And my children are too far away for that so yes, I do feel sad when it seems everyone else is having family fun.”

Now none of those ladies are shy and retiring. They all chat happily when we meet. And they attend church on Sunday morning, and the after-church natter and refreshments. Then back to an empty house. They are not, essentially, lonely people, Just a tad envious of those who are lucky enough, as am I, to have family living locally.

Its not just the ladies. I put the same question to some guys who live alone and they also admitted to blue Sunday afternoons. One said he goes down to the pub when he feels lonely.

Even in this day and age I don't think many ladies would admit to cheering themselves up with a lone visit to a public house. It was then that I heard of a local informal get together once a week of guys who gather purely to socialise. But not on a Sunday afternoon.

I asked about the topics of conversation and it appears that they range from sport, what's on television, to friendly advice on DIY and gardening, and the advantages of two or three baskets for the air fryer – many more men these days are not only cooking but are interested in menus and methods.

This would still give time to put the world to rights and discuss what they would do it if they were PM for just a day or so.

I have often commented on how voluntary work brings friendship and tackles loneliness. But on Sunday afternoons such volunteering is not always available. Perhaps we'll be seeing Sunday Afternoon Cheery Gatherings – bring your own air fryer – before the days shorten and we approach another Blue Monday.

World's Best Mother

You will find similar slogans on mass produced goods: Best Mother/Father/Granny/Grandad/Uncle/Aunt and so on. They can’t all be The Best – I suspect Carlsberg would carefully reword it as “possibly the World’s Best...”

But there is one, indubitably best mother: Mother Nature.

She’s done it again: there I was bemoaning the lack of butterflies this summer, saying how I’d only seen the pale ones: brimstone and cabbage white and said that the Butterfly Conservation charity was blaming this dearth mainly on the wet spring.

Then Dear Mother gives us some dry, sunny days and suddenly there are the darker butterflies, the meadow brown, speckled wood, gatekeeper: where had they all been hiding?

As Mark Twain said: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Thus with the butterflies.

The Butterfly Conservation people say that in the first week of their Big Butterfly Count survey 12% of participants recorded no sightings at all. Let us hope that, like us, the butterflies have been lying low waiting for the “real summer” to arrive.

Cool Clear Water

Woking Borough Council is not backward at giving us advice. In winter we are told to wrap up, wear layers of warm clothes, and shut out draughts. Now we are told to expect some hot weather. This means closing windows on the sunny side of the house and closing curtains. And keeping hydrated.

The other day I had go into central Woking. I walked, of course: I would begrudge paying for parking for I am what a friend terms “a frugal woman”.

It was hot and sultry. In Jubilee Square people were sitting on deckchairs watching the large television screen and keeping up with the Olympics. I did my chores and started on the way home. I was hot and tired. And thirsty. An old song ear-wormed its way into my head: Cool Clear Water, as sung in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs film. But none of those central Woking water points had any water.

Can anyone tell me the date of the collision of the vehicle and the water point outside Cote in Commercial Way? The one still partially bandaged in tape?

I have mentioned it many times on this page. And also, on this page, I have wondered what became of the insurance money which, surely, the owners of the vehicle must have forked out to the council?

I have recently had to make several visits to St Peter’s and Ashford Hospitals. At both places there were water points. Good, cold, clear water. So good that when we attended Ashford, with the grandchildren in tow, all our water bottles were replenished from the hospital water points because it also tasted good.

When the council do get around to mending those water points – surely not difficult because there must already be a water supply there – will they please make sure that the water may be drunk?

What I mean is that one can get the water into one’s mouth, not just into a bottle – which may not be at hand. I am sure they will say that such a supply may be too wilfully sprayed around the place by placing a finger on the source.

And they won’t go back to the old idea of a metal cup chained to the water supply because they reckon it would be nicked.

I would have been delighted to have splashed my face with cold water, even if I did splash it around a bit.

Meet Miss Jones

Woking Amateur Operatic Society, otherwise known as WAOS Musical Theatre, are putting on a couple of nights of musical theatre to raise funds for the society.

Entitled The Golden Years, the programme will contain such golden oldies as Another Opening of Another Show; My Funny Valentine; Have You Met Miss Jones? and lots of others in similar vein.

That sounds like a good night out to me. The nights in question being 6 and 7 of September at the Parish Hall, All Saints Church, Woodham. Also on offer: bar, snacks, raffle “and much more”. No, I don't know how much more.

Tickets can be purchased through www.ticketsource.co.uk/waos-musical-theatre/e-zlvjqj or, it there is space, for £12 at the door.

Rain Stopped Play

Last month rain forced the cancellation of the Picnic on the Green, the annual Horsell village event held on the green outside The Cricketers in Horsell Birch – at the end of the High Street.

It has been rescheduled for Sunday 18 August. Same time – noon until 4pm – and place but, I sincerely hope, fresh sandwiches in your hamper. There will be music during the afternoon, and all is free.