Monday 10 March 2008

The ‘Crock-Pot’, as my wife Peigi persists in calling this implement of gleaming stainless steel, has finally arrived at my door. It’s really a slow-cooker out of Tesco in Oban, and I am about to christen it. A crock-pot for an old crock.

Three gigot chops, a whole onion, two carrots, garlic, one Oxo cube, salt and pepper. Everything ready. Looks simple enough. All I have to do is throw everything into the cooking pan, add two cupfuls of water … umh, maybe three … I have some macaroni handy, and the pasta, I had been warned, would suck up a lot of liquid.

Now, Norman, I lecture myself. There’s no need to get into a frenzy over the preparation of stew. Women all over the Highlands and Lowlands do this every day. Yes, and have been doing so throughout the ages. My late mother, Peigi Bheag, Wee Peggy, my various wives and girlfriends, all did this without thinking about it. That is the problem. I have to think about it. Seventy-one years of age, no womenfolk around, and none likely to be either in the immediate future. The shameful truth is: I have never cooked a meal in my entire life.

Firstly, I have to wash and slice the vegetables. This will take some time. A severed nerve in my right forearm has left three fingers of my right hand paralyzed. I know I won’t be able to grip the knife firmly. For that matter, I was unable to sign my application for Attendance Allowance last week without using both hands. Not that the left hand is in much better nick. Since the operation last autumn for a broken humerus, when Dr Levi down in the Southern General Hospital had inserted pins in my upper left arm, I haven’t been able to raise my left arm above shoulder level. The little consultant confessed to me before I went into the operating theatre that he was having second thoughts about the complexity of the procedure after looking at the X-rays. Since then I’ve had a hundred thoughts that I ought to have had the operation done in a BUPA hospital. It could be worse, he consoled me afterwards. Although the limb would never be as supple as it was, at least there would be no more pain. With a snout full of morphine, I had to agree with him.

The pain I felt when I took the drunken tumble into a wrought-iron gate was truly excruciating. I had been returning to my tiny ‘studio flat’ in Lora Drive with a cargo of booze one Sunday evening last summer, when I felt dizzy and thought I’d better take a rest on the steps of a path in the front garden of a neighbour. I never made it. As I pushed the gate open I fell with my arms extended through the vertical iron bars. A bone from my upper left arm was actually protruding from the skin. I felt it in my right arm too: a sharp, stabbing pain in the elbow.

A couple out walking their dog discovered me lying on my stomach on the wet pavement, both arms entwined in the gate’s bars. They promptly telephoned for an ambulance. The paramedics administered oxygen on the way to the Accident and Emergency department.

Unfortunately, there was an unprecedented press of patients waiting to go under the knife for hip, knee, foot and arm operations, so that I was confined to bed until a ‘window’ presented itself. The harrowing ordeal over the next three weeks or so was compounded of morphine, co-codamol and bed rest. There had been perhaps too much of the latter. I developed bed sores. I lusted for tobacco. I was unable to read to pass the weary hours. I had no reading glasses on my person when I fell.

Eventually, the day of the operation dawned. Levi painted a line on my arm where he was going to make an incision. Somebody injected something in the back of my hand. In a short time I passed out.

When I came round, I experienced a warm, drowsy feeling of well-being. Despite having been warned that I’d probably be sick after the general anaesthetic, I hoovered up the toast and Marmite I was offered. Later on, I enjoyed the first deep sleep I’d had in months.

Unfortunately, my appetite severely diminished after that, and by the time I was discharged my weight was down to just over eight stones. For a person of my height – I used to be a six-footer, though I’ve shrunk with advancing years – this weight loss was a source of worry. My fertile imagination projected all kinds of uninformed diagnoses: cancer, MS, motor-neurone disease.

I was at my GP’s only last Friday and I’m just over the ten-stone mark now.

“Well?” I said.

“Well, honestly, Mr Maclean, I’m delighted for you,” Dr Russell said.

“Hmmph,” I snorted. “I weighed around thirteen stone when I was boxing for the university.”

“You’re gaining weight, slowly but steadily,” young Dr Russell said. “And that’s without the use of steroids. Well done.” He smiled at me as though awarding me the Dux Medal at Bellahouston Academy, my old secondary school.

I asked him about the severed nerve in my right arm, and he told me that at my age it would take over a year to repair itself. I felt like punching him out.

“Of course, you’ll have to continue with the exercises,” he said.

The exercises involved raising my right arm to shoulder level and wiggling the fingers of my hand. The last time I had attempted this little manoeuvre was on the aisle seat of the 34 bus going to Govan. Not surprisingly, this prompted two male passengers of dubious sexual orientation to wave back at me. Upon reaching the terminus, my cheeks ablaze, I trapped for the underground station like Dwayne Chambers.

“Yeah,” I drawled thoughtfully. “I’ll be doing that in the privacy of my home.”

The doctor smiled again, but this time rather oddly.

Now, as I stand looking at the foodstuffs on the worktop, my smile is a bit odd too. I suffer a twinge of apprehension as I recall the prodigious obstacle course I had to negotiate in Morrisons to obtain all this gear. Vegetable oil, tortilla wraps, macaroni … I had secured the lot. But at enormous psychic cost!

The truth is that I had made these purchases only by exerting almost superhuman will-power. I’ve known for a long time that I’m allergic to the food aisles in supermarkets. Every time I’d trawl through the shelves of exotic food I would be assailed by a top of the Richter scale panic attack. I always felt the aisles were narrowing in on me, and I would be convinced that I’d never escape to the more sedate pastures of the bakery counter which lay at right angles to the Valley of Hell.

I experienced no such anxiety, of course, when patrolling the fish counter and especially the richly-stocked alcohol shelves. But finding the macaroni in the international food section induced a kind of St Vitus’s Dance, in which I leaped from side to side in response to the strange names of the goods on the shelves. As I searched for the macaroni, labels swam into vision. ‘Ainsley Harriot Cous Cous’, ‘Bulgar Wheat’, ‘Yellow Split Peas’ – aarrgh! ‘Hearts of Palm’, ‘Sushi Nori’, ‘Passata’ – eek! ‘Pasta Rigate’, ‘Cavatappi’, ‘Sun Dried Chillies’ – oops! I stagger into a shelf of Penne Tricolore, lose my balance and go down. I am up in a flash, and with a fixed maniacal grin on my face, I grab a packet of macaroni and, cool and dignified, I saunter to the check-out.

Buzz! Inexplicable panic: there’s someone at the outside door of my building. Can it be sheriff’s officers looking to recover the debt I owe the Halifax Bank of Scotland? Jesus! Why isn’t there a resident Free Church minister in this building? I want to repent. I am a sinner!

With my left hand I lift the receiver on the wall with difficulty. “Hi,” I gasp. “Yes, this is Norman Maclean … who are you? What? … a workman. Right, come on up.” I press the black button on the console with the paralyzed forefinger of my right hand to release the lock on the outside door.

I open the door to my flat and stand in stocking soles on the concrete landing, looking down. I watch the laborious ascent of an overweight middle-aged man, bulky in luminous parka, as he slowly climbs the two flights of stairs to where I stand. Breathing hard, he scatters mud from his stout work boots behind him.

“Have you got a key for the drying area downstairs, buddy?” he says. “We’re going to put some more scaffolding up at the gable end.”

“Yeah,” I say uninterestedly, retrieving an awl-shaped tool from the hook in the hallway and handing it to him.

“Cheers, mate,” he mumbles insincerely. “We’ll return it to you when we get back.”

“You’re leaving the job now?” I say.

“Aye,” he says, as though I am some kind of retard who doesn’t understand that what he is about to do is the most normal thing in the world in the building trade. “Something’s come up.” He turns and clatters down the stairs.

Since the fourth of February, this has been happening with baffling frequency. A sole workman with a generator and electric drill will be scrambling along the scaffolding that decorates our building, affixing thermal sheeting to the original walls, which will later be pebble-dashed. The next minute he’ll be gone, for no apparent reason.

Shaking my head in disbelief, I return to my spotless kitchen. Part of me is irritated that these ageing goons are taking so long. I recalled an army of Indian tradesmen and labourers, admittedly hundreds of them, erecting a one-hundred-and-thirty-roomed...