To Physio and Beyond

King’s Cross station, like the rest of London, has been quite ludicrously poshed up, although, reassuringly, there are still the same works underway that there were when we left, over three years ago, and, if memory serves, for several years before that.

Still infused with the rationality of Mongolian and Chinese rail systems, I signally fail to negotiate the complexity that is buying train tickets in the UK. Like a tourist, I head to the machine, buy the cheapest return I can see, then (switching to native mode) realise it’s a cheap day return, AKA I need to go there and back in the same day.

Bugger.

£65 poorer (that’s over $100, American readers, for a train journey that takes under two hours), I reroute to the ticket office, leaving Zac choosing between Beano and The Simpsons and poring over a range of packet sandwiches (another snack food in which, like fish and chips, we lead the world) while I negotiate the queue.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t think I bought the right ticket. I do want a return to London, but I bought a same day return by mistake.”

The guy takes my old tickets, clears the card payment, hands me a receipt and sets me up with the correct tickets. At a little over half the price, provided I’m travelling with the child on the child ticket, we can go and come back on different days, but we’ll need to travel after 9.30am, which I was going to do anyway, since the next train to our destination is at 9.45.

And, yes, that is cheaper than the only one-way ticket available at the machines. Go figure.

It doesn’t get more ageing than a hearing aid, does it, really? Unless it’s a walking stick, or a zimmer frame, I guess. It does make conversation a hell of a lot easier, though.

King’s Lynn, unlike London, doesn’t look any cleaner. It’s a curious place, King’s Lynn, a mix of a prettily historic medieval centre, lovely low-rise flint cottages, cobbled streets, gothic churches, even the odd half-timbered building, with some absolutely abysmal concrete flung up in the same 1960s modernist shitfest that buggered up all of Oxford town centre but the bits the colleges own.

I can’t quite work out whether King’s Lynn doesn’t look clean because I’ve already adapted to being in the first world, or whether it’s that London underwent a massive makeover for the Olympics and the Jubilee and no one got around to tidying up the rest of the country (although I understand that Birmingham, the UK’s second city, and a place we southerners have historically avoided like herpes, is now a tourist destination for its Christmas Market, so, go figure).

My dad picks us up from the station. He’s a) lost weight and b) finally acquired an invisible hearing aid, an indicator of advanced age that, like any robust chap in his 60s – my father hikes at the same pace I do, and could therefore nail Everest Base Camp as easily as we did – he’s been as keen to avoid as, well, anyone would be, really, right? Because it doesn’t get more ageing than a hearing aid, does it? Unless it’s a walking stick, or a zimmer frame, I guess.

It does make conversation a hell of a lot easier, though.

Most of which conversation, as Zac zooms back into the mode of hanging out with Grandpa as though he’s never been away, is on the topic of Sid Meier’s Civilization, with only a token inspection of Zac’s arm, which, but for a scar, looks quite phenomenally undamaged.

My father, like most folk of his generation, has been expecting a cast. Or at least a sling.

Why doesn’t the NHS have enough space to do the surgery? Because they’ve been closing hospitals to cut costs. I may have over-simplified this a little, but, however you cut it, there is absolutely no way it makes sense.

My ma, like Zac, has also had a piece of metal put into her. In this instance, it’s half a knee. Yes, half a knee. Not a whole knee. Half a knee.

According to my aunts, this will come to me too around the age of 60, which is a bit annoying since my mother hasn’t really gone grey yet — I have (horrifically) been mistaken for her sister on occasion — and therefore I was really hoping to delay the more unseemly parts of ageing.

In the absolute insanity that is British medical care, my mother has had the surgery free on the NHS. However, because the NHS doesn’t have space to do it in the NHS hospitals, it has been done in a private hospital, so the NHS is paying the private hospital for the bed space, plus profit margin. The surgeon, who works for the NHS some of the time and the private hospital some of the time, is doing this job for the private hospital, so the NHS is paying a) his private rate and b) the hospital’s margin on said rate.

And why doesn’t the NHS have enough space to do the surgery? Because they’ve been closing hospitals to cut costs.

I may have over-simplified this a little, but, however you angle it, there is absolutely no way it makes sense.

The medical care, it should be emphasised, was excellent, if a little on the brusque side, what with it being shift-change on a Sunday morning and me, in hindsight at least, having one of the easier labours on record.

“Isn’t it nice?” my mother says. “I’ve never been in such a nice hospital. And the food’s brilliant!”

Compared to the splendours of our private room with floor-to-ceiling windows, wood floors, white leather sofas and private bathroom with complimentary Kiehl’s products that we had in Hong Kong on the travel insurance, not to mention the myriad restaurant options available on room service, this carpet-tiled room in an underwhelming red-brick bungalow seems a little, well, small and shabby.

Her bed, for example, doesn’t have nearly enough buttons.

But it’s definitely preferable to the space where I had Zac on the NHS, where broken internal windows had been replaced with binbags due to an absence of funds. (The medical care, it should be emphasised, was excellent, if a little on the brusque side, what with it being shift-change on a Sunday morning and me, with hindsight, having one of the easier labours on record.)

Anywise, soon Zac and Granny are comparing injuries and surgery stories very much like a couple of old ladies, I’m being scolded by nurses for doing things like sitting on the bed, my aunt’s popping in to say hello to us, and it’s all perfectly jolly.

Thanks to the miracle that is being happily married to the same woman for over 40 years and counting, my father’s culinary range does not extend significantly beyond bacon and eggs.

My father and I slip into our typical ritual of too much red wine with dinner, followed by a classic movie with Zac and too much red wine. Zac slips into his typical ritual, which is briefly refamiliarising himself with the toys and books in “his” little galleried attic bedroom, then running round to the neighbours, announcing his arrival to his friend Archie, and hitting the X-Box like a small tornado.

Archie, I am amused to notice, at the ripe old age of 14, is already over six feet tall, which gives him pretty much a foot in height on Zac, who’s not exactly shrimpy but has yet to hit his adolescent growth spurt. As with Fred and Aslan in London, neither age nor distance seems to have withered this friendship.

Thanks to the miracle that is being happily married to the same woman for over 40 years and counting, my father’s culinary range does not extend significantly beyond bacon and eggs. (He cleans and tidies, my ma does the washing, the cooking and the shopping.)

So, I cook. And mess the place up by emptying stuff out of my bag and leaving it on tables. And then we settle on the Coen Brothers for the evening. My father’s rather horrified that neither of us have seen Fargo, so we watch that, and find it absolutely bloody brilliant.

Physio is, various travelling friends have told me with varying levels of diplomacy, the sort of thing that’s best done with continuity of care unless (and I expand the subtext here) you want your child to be damaged for life, you selfish fucking cow.

Friday dawns. My father pops to the hospital to collect my ma, dropping Zac and me in town at the physio, with whom, in a fit of organisation, I made an appointment, thanks to the wonders of Google and Skype calling, from Hong Kong.

Many forms of medical follow-up can be done remotely, or with local medical teams. Physio, on the other hand, requires a physical presence to feel what’s happening with the muscles, and is, various travelling friends have told me with varying levels of diplomacy over Facebook, the sort of thing that’s best done with continuity of care unless (and I expand the subtext here) you want your child to be damaged for life, you selfish fucking cow.

The physio’s a nice, no-messing South African lady, with a background in treating rugby players, who appears mildly horrified by Zac’s general lack of flesh – as I have explained to curious onlookers the world over, he’s naturally thin, and gets it from his dad – but pleased with his progress.

“It’s good that they get them using the arm straight away in Hong Kong,” she says. “In England, they keep them in a sling for weeks, and you can imagine the level of work we have to do to get things moving after that.”

“Can you reach your arm up behind your back?” she asks.

Zac extends his bad arm behind his back and reaches his hair. She double-takes. “He’s very supple,” I say. “He can cross his legs behind his head. Show her the good arm.”

Zac reaches his good arm up behind his back and touches the middle of his skull. “Ah,” she says. “You have lost a little rotation there.”

He shouldn’t need more than a couple of follow-up appointments. Two, possibly, three. Excellent, I think. This little broken arm isn’t going to impact our travel plans at all. Not that we really have travel plans.

It emerges, alarmingly, that the solid lump in his arm both Zac and I thought was the metal plate is actually muscles gone solid after almost a week of immobility followed by surgery that, I believe, involved prising them apart and clamping them in position to get at the broken bone below.

The physio gives him a range of exercises to do, twice daily, using a stick, and instructs him to massage the scar and the area with Bio-Oil twice daily to loosen up his muscles.

He shouldn’t need more than a couple of follow-up appointments. Two, possibly, three.

Excellent, I think. This little broken arm isn’t going to impact our travel plans at all. Not that we really have travel plans, apart from eating Italian food in Italy and steak frites in Paris, visiting the Van Gogh museum and an astrophysics lab in Amsterdam, getting a proper week in in a proper flat in London to catch up with friends, doing an Outdoor First Aid course, and probably Barcelona, too.

We might need to stay in England a bit longer than planned. But in this lovely sunny weather – rural England, like much of rural Northern Europe, looks dazzling in the summer sun, not least because it comes so rarely – that’s honestly no hardship.