bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

There is a primary school report of mine somewhere in which my teacher, Miss Spickett, writes ‘Paul has been poorly for much of this term, and describes his cough as ‘like a clown leaping from a wardrobe’, and I must say I agree with him’. This is a description I stand by to this day, although I’d possibly add that it also sounds a bit like a shark trying to cough up a seal.

It doesn’t, you know, produce anything, or anything horrible like that, it just comes as quite a surprise sometimes. Coughing runs in our family, as my old dear and I established the other day while talking about my grandfather. My old dear always wistfully mentions that he ‘had such a desire to be a teacher’.   This is true, and, as I usually point out, if only it was as strong as his other desire – to repeatedly steal curtain material from warehouses in Limehouse and sell it at Petticoat Lane market – a lot of things might have been very different.

[HItting read more now will reveal all manner of lung related rambling]

Our coughs have different origins, however. Mine is a souvenir of a near-fatal childhood tuberculosis episode which left my lungs in ribbons. My grandfather’s came about as the result of sixty years’ enthusiastic consumption of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes. He frequently described himself as ‘entirely teetotal, except for all the booze and fags’ and, as you may recall, once shot his ear off by accident. These insights should give you an adequate idea of the general cut of his jib. And whereas my cough is loud but clean, his cough would result in what appeared to be chunks of oily moss being hurled about if he so much as cleared his throat discretely to advise a lady that her slip was showing.

It was a mixture of the fags and generally liking a scrap which proved to be the undoing of my step father, too. Left with the lung capacity of an eight year old girl following major surgery, he jumped out of bed to confront a (non-existent, as it turned out) burglar, forgot that his days of kicking it off were at least two decades behind him, stumbled, fell onto the corner of a bedside table and broke a rib which subsequently punctured the postage stamp sized bit of lung that he still
retained. It was, as I was fond of remarking at the time, quite a shot. I think it was suitably indicative of our warm, but not overly close, relationship that our last communication was a balloon I sent him while he was in hospital which had ‘You Silly Bastard’ written on it.

Photards: Top – mugs for the stall at Greenwich.

Middle: The interior of the ladies’ at the Duke of Wellington. It is strangely reminiscent of the cover of Rio by Duran Duran, yes.  It was probably top of the Hit Parade the last time it was decorated.

Bottom: By contrast, the interior of the gents’.  Vinny claimed that the tiles had been stolen, but later retracted the story.  I am still inclined to think that they were, and maintain that we should in turn steal the wall of the gents’ at the Ten Bells, which is quite ornate.

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