LYING prostrate on my sick bed – can’t you tell I’m feeling a bit better – I’m channelling my inner Emily Bronte and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Pale, interesting, coughing and, thankfully, unlike my sisters of yore, not that ill, I can feel a sonnet coming on, it’s just that I’m not quite up to a decent rhyme yet.
Thanks to a young earnest doctor, the National Health Service has been nippy and on its toes and there has been a lot of whizzing about down bright corridors and under hi-tech machinery.
They’re thorough, I’ll give you that.
“Once they get a hold of you, they don’t really let up, do they?” I tell my friend.
“It’s just that we are over 50,” she sighed.
“Do we look old?” I asked my other half.
“Well, we’re not 20, so we don’t look young,” he sighed.
It’s not that bad if you don’t look in the mirror too often. It’s just that awful moment when you catch a glimpse and wonder who that old bird is staring back?
Still, I’m just happy to be here and generally fit. It’s the yoga, I swear. Even though I’m too ill to go at the moment, the rewards of regular dog head down are evident.
“Yes,” sighs my son, “But do you have to swing your leg up straight and grab your toes when we’re having our tea and watching Pointless.”
He has a point. My party piece is bending over to touch my toes and standing on my hands, legs straight.
“Look at me,” I want to shout. “I may be motoring towards a free bus pass but my hamstrings are well and truly stretchy. How’s about that, Mo Farah?”
Mo has my heartfelt sympathy ever since Trump banned certain immigrants and Mo – who has made America his home – tweeted that the queen had made him a knight and Donald Trump had made him an alien.
But dear reader, let us return to the beginning.
Whilst on my sick couch I lay, in vacant and in pensive mood (name that poem), I chanced upon writer Colin Thubron’s radio report of a night 30 years ago when he ended up sleeping in Mao Zedong’s bed. Not with him, you understand. The dictator had been dead 10 years... but his memory lingered on in the huge four poster with hard boards – Mao didn’t care for bedding.
He was, mused Thubron, responsible for 70 million deaths through famine and prosecution, and there sat the writer at Mao’s desk, scribbling notes at the same place, gazing out of the same window at the same view.
And it made me think of beds I have frequented... strange beds in weird places.
Yes, there were the bare boards of the deck on the ferry from Brindisi to Corfu. A sailor called Demetrius tried to lure me to his cabin with promises of a soft mattress and a bunch of grapes – did he think I floated up the Lagan in a bubble?
But the strangest bed was in a big old grey brick 'hotel' in Warsaw in 1992. We went because it was very cheap and we were two poor journalists, out to investigate Poland post communism. There was a whiff of an old asylum or prison about it.
I had never seen a hotel with a 'window slot' in the bedroom doors – the kind the guard shunts open and shut to check on the inmates. The bed was lumpy but if you’ve slept on the deck of a Greek ferry, it was not too bad. The corridors were long and empty and cold.
Foxy ladies of the night hung about the hallway of an evening and the breakfast room was packed with grim looking, buttoned-up komrade types.
You could have a shower in a big old bathroom for a few zlotys more. A huge big stroppy woman wore the keys to said bathroom around her waist and demanded the fee.
“I’m not going in there alone,” we shrieked in unison – and we didn’t. We cast modesty to the winds for the sheer fear of it all and took turns under the shower in the same bathroom with the door firmly locked behind us.
Now, lying on the relative safe comfort of my couch and binge-watching endless episodes of Gilmore Girls, I look back to strange times and strange beds... and I smile.
