 |
| On this Berck beach you can display yourself in the altogether. But not in your car or on your motorbike |
One year our best US friends were over for a visit and we decided to take them for a quick flit to France. Not tourist France, ordinary France, somewhere in the north. Mike, the husband, comes from Rhode Island and is linked umbilically to the sea. So why not a resort on France’s channel coast? Why not, say, Berck-sur-Plage which would be new to me too?
The moral of this story is when in France, it’s best to know where you’re going.
Berck has one single raison d’etre, providing convalescent care for invalids. And when I say “invalid” I mean those with long-term needs, stretching way into the future. Lots and lots of them. Strangely, many were comparatively young.
So not only were the sidewalks crowded with slow-moving folk using walking sticks (the US calls these things “canes” but I never got the habit) and Zimmer frames. Others, with greater incapacity, lay on what looked like those minimalist beds you see in operating theatres which they managed to propel by means that were hard to discern.
Look, I’m as sympathetic as anyone to those with illness but this was an occasion for showing Mike and Maggie the wonders of France and I fear Berck didn’t cut it. We dropped into a bar and two very pale individuals with half-drunk glasses of beer gazed at us with supreme lack of interest. I must confess we became uneasy, didn’t talk much.
Yesterday I walked to the newsagent, a mile there, a mile back. Easily my longest walk since the op. I think I walked more or less briskly but can’t be sure. Did I look like an invalid? I wondered whether my face was pallid, whether I occasionally shuffled. And if so, did I deserve the Berck sentence? What goes round…
We rarely see ourselves as others do. In the middle of a two week backpacking walk only about five tears ago when I would be seventy seven I saw myself as a fit and mobile adventurer. As I was crossing a road in a town one morning a woman with two eight year old kids was coming the other way and she called out to them "watch out for the old man."
ReplyDeleteGlad you are out--with or without the walking stick--and walking several miles. And not in Berckian buff...
ReplyDeleteMarly: Each day I walk a little faster, and all dressed in black. On the whole this seems to discourage casual conversation.
DeleteMost people would not even have noticed you, RR. The singer Leonard Cohen, known for his priapic involvements, once said, "When I became an old man I became invisible". It is only since I have become old, with geriatric illnesses, that I have taken notice of other old people, watching how they walk and diagnosing arthritis (me too). Watching how they dress, particularly when it's warm when the males are wearing tighter tee shirts, and diagnosing prostate cancer from enhanced breast tissue, enlarged by taking "feminine" drugs (me too).
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh/Avus: I'm not really concerned with how others see me, it's how I see myself. Remember, I'm a changed person. I left part of me behind in the rubbish bin at the Hereford County operating theatre.
ReplyDelete