The Runton Diaries

The Things You Won’t Allow Us, Part 2

Aug 12th, 2022

Public Service Announcement: we finished last time declaring an intention to form a trade union and save the working class. It wasn’t a terribly dramatic declaration, as it took place silently, in my head, during someone else’s liver biopsy. Still, there we are. I’ve discussed it with my current girlfriend and my dog, who both like the idea.

The founding of a trade union and resultant socio-political shift away from the middle class is not a usual train of thought to pursue while assisting with surgery. However, as our patient had no short term memory, and needed no conversation other than constant reassurance that he wasn’t being kidnapped, I was able to think the whole thing through in some detail. He was, in fact, admirably calm for someone who considers themselves a kidnap victim, and was happy enough with me saying, in my hospital voice, ‘Hospital, Ray. You’re in a hospital in Norwich. Yes. Myself and this gentleman are just doing a quick liver biopsy on you. Biopsy. No, your liver. Hospital, Ray. You’re in a hospital and myself and this gentleman are just going to do a biopsy on your liver. Liver. Your liver. Yes. Norwich. No, you’re in hospital, Ray. You and your liver are in a hospital in Norwich’ for forty five minutes until a tiny bit of Ray was in a small pot and away for analysis with those dorks in Pathology.

Anyway. Our current nursing unions seem hopeless. In fact, if there is one thing that contemporary socio-industrial history has taught us, it’s that nurses will put up with anything. Nursing unions can’t even protect nurses, heroically settling for whatever pay rises the government tell them to, and so forth. So what of we non-clinical staff, with our thirteen hour, minimum wage, no-paid-breaks shifts and routine undertaking of tasks for which we are neither qualified nor paid because there is simply no one else to do them? I imagine that we are a long way down their list of priorities. One of the reasons I imagine this is the sheer number of times we are referred to as Heroes on sundry NHS social media outlets – any employer who constantly tells you how heroic you are is not paying you enough, and no amount of rainbow lettering and applause emojis can hide this. In fact, the only tangible use of union resource I can ascertain is stickers all over the East Block bike shelter with ‘She Was Just Walking Home’ on them, as a reminder that assaulting middle class women is bad. I am always tempted to write ‘What? On her bike?’ underneath, but have thus far thought better of it.

I should very much like to make things better for my fellow workers. Incidentally, I don’t mean ‘workers’ in some fanciful, middle class Socialist sense. I am a right-leaning free market pragmatist, so I mean ‘workers’ in the sense of actual people in actual employment, in the actual world that actually exists. I should probably just say ‘employees’ to clear all that up, come to think of it. Anyway. I think the Non-Clinical Workers’ Union, which is what I shall call it, could not only provide a lesson in the correct placement of an apostrophe in conjunction with a plural possessive noun, but valuable representation for low grade staff such as myself and my A Team, who keep every hospital in the country ticking over. If the NHS is saveable, it is us who will save it. Indeed – If there was hope, it must lie in the proles…in those swarming, disregarded masses, to quote George Orwell in his famous book ‘It’s 1984!’

We needn’t be as flimsy as the existing nursing unions, either. For a start, we don’t have a twenty five year career tied up in the NHS, so we have no vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Also, because we are not bound by Hippocratic or any other codes, we do not need to be squeamish about strike action. I envisage this consisting of sitting calmly and cheerfully in the staff room for three hours every Wednesday afternoon offering people tea and biscuits, rather than shouting in a donkey jacket in a car park like it’s the nineteen seventies. Above all, I want my union to be quiet, dignified, and relentless. We’ve all been listening to shouty people for far too long and, in the interests of balance, it might be nice to let calm, rational people have a go for once.

To do this, I would need to disentangle it from the middle class Left. This is important as, throughout my lifetime, their purpose has been to take politics away from those who need it, via a concerted socio-economic campaign of marginalisation, demonisation and ungovernable personal politics. This confiscation of power has been catastrophic for the working class and therefore society as a whole, and must be challenged. However, we must remain a specific group of employees striving against specific circumstances of our employment, rather than acting for or against undefinable notions of class because, although the usual outcome when identifying societal groups as your problem is that you end up very boring and very embarrassing, there is the occasional capacity for thousands of people to get killed. Above all, we must remember that when you stare into an abyss, it also stares into you, to quote Frederick Nietzsche in his famous book Calm Down A Bit, Before You Get Carried Away.

I finished formulating all this as Ray’s biopsy ended. It concluded amid a lot of ‘Finished, Ray. We’re done now. We’ll just sort out some paperwork for your doctor and send you back to your ward. Ward. Doctor. Hospital, Ray. You’re in hospital, Ray. Biopsy. No, we’ve done it. Just then. You have a little doze and then we’ll take you back to your ward. Ward. Hospital, Ray. You’re in a hospital, Ray’, and so on.

As I pushed Ray and his bed out to Recovery, I said ‘That’s the trouble with hospital, Ray, isn’t it? No one tells you anything’, as a little chuckle for me and the surgeon.

‘About what?’ he replied, neatly putting me back in my box.

Photards

Main: Cows in a field. These things are massive and, if startled, can jump twenty feet vertically.

Top inset: That time a trampoline ended up wedged between our house and the garden wall after a ferocious coastal storm. It’s my son’s trampoline. He refers to it as a jumpoline, and we are lucky it didn’t smash the kitchen off.

Middle inset: I am already a union rep, and enjoy it, although I don’t represent anyone at the hospital. Well, yet, anyway.

Lower inset: There was an amusing couple of months in my son’s life when, if I set the hands on this thing to ten o’clock, and said ‘Look at the time!’, he would put himself away in it.
The Things You Won’t Allow Us, Part 1

Aug 8th, 2022

Public Service Announcement: This was an extremely long entry which I split in two in order to get a bit of a cliff hanger going. It’s not much of a nail biter to be honest, unless your definition of tension includes absent mindedness and socio-politics. It takes all sorts though, so if this is your definition of tension, move to the edge of your seat now or, if you’re standing up, start chain smoking and pacing about in an agitated manner.

I am fond of saying that a hospital is one bunch of fat depressed people looking after another bunch of fat depressed people, and that the only way to tell staff from patients is that the patients are lying down. There is more to it than this, of course: consultants are generally called James or Ben, whereas matrons, charge nurses and ward sisters are called Laura and Lucy and Ellie. Everyone else is called Lauren and Ellie-Mae. Patients are called Ray or Phillip or Mary or Liz. You get the occasional Kirsty and Helen among both staff and patients, but I am to date the only Paul who has ever been in a hospital, and as such I am a medical pioneer.

As mentioned last time, my pioneering spirit has seen me become de facto supervisor of a little band of trainee trainee nurses. We are like the A Team, except that we don’t have any useful skills, we don’t have a van, and no one but the NHS would hire us to do anything whatsover. A dog could do most of our work, but we are cheaper because we bring our own lunch in. Then again, it is cannon fodder such as we who run the hospital, and everyone acknowledges this. Myself, I do everything from setting up operating theatres with all the drugs and what not to working directly with surgeons and scrub nurses during operations to wheeling patients, most alive but some very much the opposite of that, around the hospital, to proofreading and editing hospital literature – which gives me an opportunity to remove awkward phrases such as ‘medical doctor’, and replace them with ‘doctor’, and take the chance that people won’t assume their liver biopsy will be carried out by a time traveller in a phone box.

I enjoy a day of assisting with liver biopsies. Essentially, you’re a scrub nurse, working intimately with both the surgeon and the patient. I like to relax patients beforehand by saying I’m a bit of a fainter when it comes to needles, so can you hold my hand and tell the surgeon if you see me keeling over, etc. Fortunately, I’m not a fainter when it comes to anything at all or I’d have a hundred reasons to pass out every working day but, rather pleasingly, I do sometimes have patients saying ‘You alright, Paul?’ to me, mid-procedure. I also sometimes ask if they’re OK with Labradors because the surgeon is blind, or do they mind if we have a kebab before we start because we’re very drunk, and so forth. I mean, obviously, you have to read the room before this sort of thing but, as I am fond of saying – ‘If you can’t muck about during surgery, when can you muck about?’.

While I do not yet perform such a prominent role in our hospital’s main theatres, they are also often surprisingly light-hearted places. This is good, because it shows that the theatre team is confident and relaxed. You wouldn’t want your operation carried out by people who were anxious and nervy, after all. The first time I was in main theatre to, I think, assist with some kind of urology expedition I spent the entire time discussing childbirth with the anaesthetist, explaining that at the moment of my son’s birth all I could think of was Kit Kats, as they had those mad chunky single digit ones in the vending machine down the corridor and I was very peckish at the time. He sympathised, because there was a Full English deal on at the canteen – any nine items for 99p – when his daughter was born and, despite her being successfully delivered two and a half hours before the offer ran out, he still only just made it. He went for maximum variety, including fried tomatoes, probably I suspect as a celebration of the earth’s wondrous bounty. I’d have had six soft poached eggs and three slices of light granary toast myself, but becoming a father is quite tiring and each new dad needs to regain his strength as he sees fit.

All in all, the ability to be not quite in the moment is a valuable asset for anyone working in a hospital, and if you’re thinking of working in one yourself – perhaps to fulfill a lifelong ambition of being tired and poor – I strongly recommend you learn how to do it. I mean, pay attention and all that, obviously, but also try and think about something else quite often or you won’t get through your first week. The results can surprise you. For example, during a recent routine liver biopsy, I realised that I needed to start a trade union, and save the working class. It was quite a remarkable moment, although obviously under the circumstances I had to keep it to myself.

Photards:

Main: The biscuit tin in A & E. As usual, it doesn’t have any custard creams in it, because I routinely steal them on behalf of the Radiology team.

Inset top: It will never not be the Jubilee in our staff room.

Inset middle: The scrubs cupboard. XL and XXL usually run out first. The NHS is so fat.

Inset lower: This used to be part of an airfield during World War Two. I let my dog run around and go nuts here now. The arrow is pointing towards Germany.
King Of All The Dogsbodies

Jun 4th, 2022

Public service announcement: Before we start, can I acknowledge that the Christmas references at the beginning of this post are out of place now that summer is upon us – these days, I’m either doing my job as an NHS hero or catatonic from doing my job as an NHS hero, so it takes longer to write stuff. Also, while we’re at it, can I ask that people stop buying NHS staff Cadbury’s Heroes, because everyone is fucking sick of them. End of announcement.

Silent night, holy night. At Runton, all is calm, all is bright. Round yon virgin – Becka, who has numerous children – the Estate sleeps in Heavenly peace, untroubled by the annoyances of the modern world, or indeed by anything much at all, except the noiseless rusting of the Victorian greenhouse and the nibbling of trees by deer wandering around the glamping fields. It seems likely to remain in statis until summer at least, with those of us comprising its estranged Estate Management team scattered hither and yon across sundry East Anglian villages or, in ‘Anton’s case, a kennel in Leeds, where he remains in business as a widely disliked electrician. Joe and I also have other things to do, of course: we remain a haphazard but effective IT help desk and, to my enduring disbelief, I have become a trainee nurse. Well, a trainee trainee nurse, as established previously. Joe valiantly keeps Runton alive, in the sense that bacteria are alive, with sub-zero classic film nights in the restored barn and discussions about skinning wild game with the survivalists for which Runton has long been a magnet, even when the only thing most people needed to survive was Bake Off going to commercial telly.

The world has been turning, of course. The Russian invasion of Ukraine

is awful, at least it took attention away from the Winter Olympics. Also, the middle class didn’t have a chance to sort everything out by writing ‘Love Wins’ in rainbow lettering across Red Square, or gluing themselves to public transport, because they were busy watching a bunch of fellow Lauras snowboarding on their gap year, which is what the Winter Olympics basically is. This is history now, though: as I write, we’re in the middle of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations of which, as a constitutional monarchist, I approve. Joe, Becka and their numerous children are in London taking in the festivities but, despite my monarchist leanings, I have no especial desire to wander around in a comedy union jack hat all weekend. In fact, the nearest I’ve been to a joyous outpouring was celebrating seeing a Spitfire while walking the dog by insisting that, as a family, we ate fish and chips afterwards while I played There’ll Always Be An England on a loop on my phone. The two public holidays were nice though and, as we don’t get paid public holidays in the NHS, I also now have an opportunity to work extra days to make the time up, which is a lovely bonus treat.

At work, the hospital exists in a state of insistent and unrelenting chaos, but for my immediate clinical colleagues there is a surprising amount of standing around during the working day. Less so for us trainee trainee nurses, for whom there are no end of menial things to be getting on with, but still a surprising amount. I should stress that this is peculiar to our little Radiology unit, which comprises four operating theatres into which we book patients. This means that the ball is in our court far more than the rest of the hospital, and because we are a theatre-lead unit, it only takes one surgeon to call in with COVID and the of the theatre team have nothing to do. We have a small ward for monitoring patients – or, as I insist we refer to them, contestants – pre- and post-procedure, but we don’t have overnight guests, which means that we function more with the atmosphere of a genteel private clinic than a publicly funded hospital. I mean, we are in a publicly funded hospital, but our secret lift to Level 4 is difficult to find, not for use by the unescorted public, and does a fine job of keeping the bedlam at bay. It also means that I can bring patients to the attention of clinical staff when bringing them in by announcing something along the lines of ‘Put your hands together, give it up, go wild, go crazy for Ethel, representing Great Yarmouth, and still rocking the main stage at 94’ to lift the mood a bit. This seems to please everyone and, as I say, we are bored quite often, so I shall continue to do it.

You may rest assured that the rest of the hospital is not like this. For future reference, the bits you want to work in are chemotherapy (the patients are independent and look after themselves), the mortuary (for, now I come to think of it, much the same reason) or paedeatrics because it’s a larf and most of time the parents do everything. I’d like to end up in maternity, as I would find the prospect of dealing with two patients at once interesting, although like paedeatrics they don’t employ males so I’d have to identify as a woman first. I could just identify as a midwife and start immediately, I suppose. Anyway, I remain generally weirded out by hospital life, and it’s worth remembering that I never wanted to be a nurse, let alone a trainee trainee nurse. Admittedly, it does seem an unlikely thing to have undertaken by accident, but that is more or less what happened when I blithely agreed to ‘give it a year and see what happens’ as a general Radiology dogsbody, mainly because I wasn’t really paying attention to what was being said to me. The term ‘dogsbody’ in this case is ill-advised, as although a dog could do most of my work, it would be more expensive to employ. It isn’t an aspirational post either – when neighbours ask my current girlfriend why I’m never around these days, she says I’m in prison.

That said, my rise to prominence is already underway; such is the shortage of staff that literally within an hour of passing my probation exam, I was awarded mentorship of all the other trainee trainee nurses, and therefore King of all the Dogsbodies. They need a bit of mentoring, too; during a written test, one of them was asked to list the PRIDE mnemonic representing the values to which the hospital and its staff allegedly conform. I expect the R is for ‘Respect’ and the E is for ‘Excellence’ and so on. You get the idea. Despite being a bit unclear myself when faced with the same question, I was nonetheless able to answer correctly because it is written on every single physical and electronic communication the hospital puts out, including, I couldn’t help but notice, the test paper itself. Unfortunately, my mentee failed to notice this, and failed the test as a result, prompting me to remark that perhaps the E is for ‘Eyesight’, and the I might mean ‘In Fucking Front Of You’. He successfully lobbied to retake the test on account of his autism, which is a relief, as staff of this calibre explain why, for a twelve hour shift with no paid breaks or lunch, we take home £55. Anyway. ‘There’s no ‘I’ in hospital’, as I am fond of pointing out to my little team, and with this as our motto we march forward together.

Photards

Main: Jubilee decorations by children. There are about fourteen tons of this stuff distributed around the place.

Inset top: Preparing a liver biopsy. My job is to hand all this stuff, and sundry other needles and spikes, to the bioper while they work on the biopee. I like to use these terms rather than ‘patient’ and ‘consultant’, because ‘biopsy’ is quite a jolly word when you think about how it actually sounds and that.

Inset middle: Sid eating a Jubilee cake. Although the flag is edible, I told him that eating it would be treason, which I will not accept in my house.

Inset lower: Ultrasound scanner. I tell patients we have to put this entire machine inside them to see what’s going on.
Getting Things From Cupboards

Dec 6th, 2021

Until recently, I’ve always imagined that Bad, by sinister pop star Michael Jackson, is what’s playing in my dog’s mind when he puts his head out of the car window on a sunny day. While I still believe this, I also now also associate it with vital surgery conducted under local anaesthetic as, at the request of the patient, it was playing in an operating theatre I found myself in last week. The atmosphere was surprisingly informal and, while I was only there to mop up afterwards, it was an enthralling experience, and an unexpected light moment in what has been a grueling introduction to hospital life.

My main medical speciality thus far is getting things from cupboards and putting them in other, smaller cupboards. I explained this to a nurse during my first shift on an actual ward. She seemed pleased.

‘So – do you want anything from a cupboard at all?’, I asked after a short pause.

‘Um, no’, she replied, and our conversation ended there.

I didn’t see her again, because hospitals are run by Health Care Assistants, who are the people in shiny grey nylon uniforms you see scurrying about the place. HCA training is part of the complex and arduous NHS boot camp to which I am to be subjected over the foreseeable future. Nurses are often seen as somewhat lazy by HCA’s, although every nurse I have spoken to has been friendly and helpful – largely, I suspect, because I look like everyone’s dad, and am usually the only male staff member they have ever seen. If I didn’t wear a uniform and keep getting things out of cupboards they would think I was a patient, even though, in this intensely female environment, 80% of those are female, too. ‘Why are women are so fucking ill?’, as I remarked during my first tea break, seven hours after I started work.

I quickly realised that here, order and chaos are the same thing. Every minute of every hour of every day, the jigsaw is disassembled, thrown into the air, and somehow comes down again with all the bits in the right place. It’s a thing to behold. Everyone is hurrying somewhere, but also hurrying nowhere, as indecent haste would be bad form. Indeed, the first trick you learn is how to walk fast-slow, which makes your shins hurt. Actually, that is the second trick you learn. The first is the pragmatic bonhomie that is the only sustainable response to the tsunami of human inconvenience hurtling towards you on all sides. Perhaps the most surprising thing, given my aversion to the infirm and gag reflex that triggers whenever I smell hospital food, is that my fledgling medical career seems to be off to a satisfactory start, despite the initial bout of training being so intense that I would silently weep on the train home. At the end of the first week I announced I was getting ‘Nothing Is Real’ tattooed on my arm, as whispering this to myself behind my COVID mask was the only way I had coped with large parts of the previous five days. I consider myself to be a physically and mentally strong person, too – God knows what the affect would be on someone who was a bit of a bender.

With regards to the tea break I mentioned earlier: these are not paid. Neither are roughly half my fifteen training room classmates, all of whom are female, twelve of whom are under 24, and all of whom are solidly working class. Young working class females are an unstoppable force of nature rarely acknowledged in contemporary society. They aren’t even Millennials, because Millennials are a middle class invention, pertaining to middle class youth. My classmates are the chavs at the bus stop. They are also, as far as I am concerned, collectively the girl in the wartime We Can Do It poster, which white middle class women unsurprisingly think is somehow about them. Many of my classmates are engaged to soldiers and, come to think of it, the armed forces must be pretty working class too, or else we’d have aircraft carriers called HMS Fri-yay or HMS Yoga. It’s probably worth remembering at this point that neither the working class nor middle class, nor any gender whatsoever, is looking to me to sort it out. Still, in response to their astonished enquiries, I explained that I am here because, as an almost entirely female entity, the NHS needs someone who can open jars and help with parallel parking, as the car park is so messy it’s visible from space. We are training vocationally, as no one can afford to go to university and are, essentially, trainee trainee nurses, occupying a rung on the health care ladder so low that most people would never know it existed. At least we are not contributing to the parking problem, because there is a six year waiting list for a permit. Parking with the patients costs sixteen pounds a day, so no one drives to work. I commute by a variety of methods including, if all else fails, a fifty mile round trip by bike which, rather touchingly, my fellow trainee trainee nurses think is impossible. This is high praise indeed, because I consider them capable of literally anything. In two years’ time we could be proper state registered nurses, with the opportunity to earn roughly as much as a full time Uber driver, so there’s a lot to play for.

I found myself reflecting, as I performed routine observations on a fading woman in a side room who would die before my shift finished, that this is how it ends for all those Beatle fans I’ve been watching in old footage all this time. It ends here, gurgling to nothingness in a provincial hospital with a trainee trainee nurse saying ‘I’m just going to do your blood pressure, Janet’ and asking family members, gathered around the bed, if they want any biscuits or anything. There is, as ever, mercy: their loved ones won’t remember them like this, and the wider world will forever remember them in brilliant dresses, screaming at the Beatles. I have never subscribed to the mawkish deification of NHS workers as heroes and, once I explained to my classmates what ‘mawkish deification’ means, neither have they. That said, it is, from the outset, a demanding, responsible and sometimes lonely way to earn a living. I find it easy to compartmentalise, because when I get home I often can’t believe any of it actually happened. There is no doubt, as I explained to my current girlfriend, that the Paul of six weeks ago is no longer with us. Part of my inner being is being scoured away, to be replaced by something, well, more. ‘Are you sure this is a hospital?’, she said, ‘You haven’t accidentally joined a fucking cult, have you?’

Photards:

Main: I once had a long and successful career as a market trader and general quick thinking hustle merchant. Seems a long time ago now. This is my old pitch in the East Yard, Camden Lock which I shared with Northern C3PO, aka Martin the Jewellery Vendor, for five years. By the look of things, this is summer 2009. Shortly after this, I moved the main operation to Greenwich.

Inset top: After witnessing surgery for the first time.

Inset middle: We Can Do It, assuming there are vegan menu options and no gluten within a fifteen mile radius.

Inset lower: They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old.
I Guess God Just Called His Number

Oct 26th, 2021

In his 2004 Patience album, George Michael lyrically posed the question ‘If Jesus Christ is alive and well, how come John and Elvis are dead?’. I should imagine that a lot of it is down to genetics. Presley’s father was a manual labourer with a congenital heart condition, whereas Jesus’ father, famously, is God. There are also lifestyle choices to consider: Elvis and John Lennon had significant issues with drugs, and for many years ate badly, drank heavily, and generally made poor lifestyle choices. Jesus, by contrast, enjoyed a seasonal and organic diet, drank in moderation and despite holding down two jobs – carpenter and son of God – was able to do so while fitting in exercise and plenty of fresh air.

I discussed this with my old dear as we pondered the recent death of her cat, who had been ailing for some time. Towards the end of his life, my old dear, who is not a trained veterinary professional, described him as ‘looking a bit vague, like he was trying to remember his national insurance number, but couldn’t’. It would be heavy handed to have him humanely destroyed for this alone, but he had been poorly for some time; the decision was made, and thus Tuppence was ushered among the countless cushions of Cat Heaven. Coincidentally, two other cats on my old dear’s street have been put down this year, prompting me to remark that ‘it’s like 2016 again’ – a year which, as you may recall, was regarded quaintly at the time as a bit of a nightmare due to a mysterious curse that saw several elderly celebrities die after decades of massive and prolonged drug use for no apparent reason whatsoever. My old dear agreed that yes it is, it really is, despite not knowing what I was talking about. Among the fallen of 2016 was, of course, Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, known to the world as George Michael out of Wham!.

Wham! came to my attention one distant childhood afternoon at West Ham, when Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go was played over the tannoy prior to a game against Arsenal. The opening jitterbug refrain coincided with the exact moment a group of Arsenal fans invaded the Chicken Run, an area of Upton Park which had, to say the least of it, little to do with the animated film of the same name. Arsenal, who could put out good numbers back then, were giving a decent account of themselves, and I watched on with interest. As the song continued, I found the reference to the sun shining brighter than Doris Day an interesting contrast to the unfolding melee, which consisted of people in golfing jumpers, as was the terrace fashion of the time, beating the absolute shit out of each other. The line come on baby, let’s not fight also tickled me because, by this point, everyone was fighting. The stewards and programme vendors had waded in, and even the disabled did their bit by hurling coins into the fray from the wheelchair section opposite. It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen, a view shared by the many kids from my school who were there, and was pretty much all everyone talked about for days, especially as Everton were visiting the following week, and they were blade merchants. I’m sure eight year olds in all those down-to-earth, honest-to-goodness, working class Labour boroughs have exactly the same sensibilities now.

Anyway. We have always been a family club at West Ham, and supporters of every generation, on every terrace, joined in the chorus of South Bank! Do your job! which all but drowned out the final bars of Wham!’s iconic breakout hit. The South Bank ICF* did indeed do their job, even though this meant working on a Saturday, for which they presumably got paid time and a half. In a blur of Pringle jumpers and Adidas Gazelles, Arsenal were pushed out of the Chicken Run, onto the concourse behind the ground, back up the Barking Road, and in many cases into the casualty department of the Royal London Hospital. I didn’t become a huge fan of Wham! afterwards or anything – I was already developing a Beatles obsession which remains undimmed to this day – but the episode stuck in my mind, and George Michael, assisted by Andrew Ridgeley (allowed into the band for having the most Eighties name ever) seemed like a right larf. I liked them enough to decide that Everything She Wants was my favourite of their songs and, years later, I blazed a trail by becoming the only male heterosexual to buy and enjoy George Michael’s Faith album. As a result, I was obliged to defend myself against adolescent accusations of being a bender, even though there was no need to because I had fingered a girl by then, largely, come to think of it, by virtue of owning the album in the first place.

Let us now pause to contrast George Michael with David Bowie, another victim of the 2016 curse. Bowie was more commercially successful and culturally recognisable than George Michael, and great and fantastic and everything, but I could never love him. That said, fandom is irrational, and not some kind of pissing contest – although maybe that’s what George thought was happening when he was arrested for lewd behaviour in the public toilets in Beverly Hills that time. Bowie was cool and full of heroin chic; George Michael usually had hair like someone’s old mum and got accidentally drunk on cough mixture. I could never not love him, with his dad-at-the-disco stage moves, holding out microphones for the crowd to sing into, which they usually didn’t. You wouldn’t catch David Bowie cruising for lorry drivers on Hampstead Heath or stabbing the cat with an undercover cop and, although these are experiences for which I have never yearned, it is somehow brilliant that George got busted for both. George Michael crashed his car into the Hampstead branch of Snappy Snaps while confused; I once rode my bike into the back of an Audi while wondering what Russ Abbot was up to these days, and I feel these are experiences we could have swapped with little surprise to our respective peer groups. There was an easy kinship to be had with the chubby bloke from Finchley Road that the Spider From Mars was too busy banging on about Berlin and outer space to adequately provide.

Few of us can look forward to a genuinely dignified end, death being perhaps the greatest leveller, whether you are an absent-minded domestic pet or an international style icon. Well, except for David Bowie, of course, who knocked out a farewell album and final photo shoot in Soho before dematerialising like Doctor Who and coming back as a Lamborghini. Not so George Michael. His demise was superbly anti-brilliant, falling into a coma following a bout of pneumonia and emerging talking like someone who has spent their entire life in a remote Cornish village, due to Foreign Accent Syndrome, which baffles the world of medicine and could only happen to George. Sadly, it cleared up before a tour could be organised, robbing us all of the astonishing experience of Father Figure and Freedom being rendered in the manner of the Worzels, and he died some months later on Christmas Day, his last weeks spent playing Scrabble while his body deteriorated into a steroid-bloated mess. Only after his death did the extraordinary extent of his benevolence emerge, notably with the anonymous bankrolling of IVF treatment for a contestant on Deal Or No Deal who failed to win enough money to pay for it herself. Being honest, I am uncomfortable with the wealthy and famous deciding which random peasant to elevate with their Godlike power in this manner – could you not just have donated to research or a suitable charity or something? – but let’s not end on a sour note, especially when discussing such a beautiful man. Bloated and Cornish his body may have been at the end, but his soul was in fine fettle, and that’s the main thing.

*’Inter City Firm’, notorious West Ham hooligans.

Photards:

Main: Back of the old South Bank, Upton Park.

Top inset: George Michael in the late Eighties. There was widespread disbelief when he came out as a gay man.

Middle inset: Yes, giggle if you want, but do it from thirty five years away because these malnourished children, who I think are Portsmouth’s extremely handy 657 Crew, will batter you without a second thought. Incidentally, ‘657 Crew’, like ‘Inter City Firm’, is also a reference to public transport – the 06:57 was traditionally the train they would catch from Portsmouth when going up North. I’d like to hear Ringo Starr narrating these exploits in the manner of his work on Thomas the Tank Engine.

Lower inset: The point at which George’s car collided with the Hampstead branch of Snappy Snaps. Someone’s written Wham! on it.