The Gnome Stayed Home.

Most of today was awful. It was one of those days when you begin seriously to suspect that there’s a little gnome of misfortune suffering with toothache who is intent on causing you all sorts of irritating mischief just because he’s in a bad mood. A day of mishaps, mayhem, and malfunctions.

(Isn’t it odd that so many words with a negative connotation begin with the letter M?)

Actually, there probably wasn’t any gnome. It was probably all due to my being tense over today’s trip to the Royal Derby Hospital for my annual CT scans. The whole arrangement has not gone well this year, you see, apparently due to the backlogs that have developed in the NHS for several reasons. Today’s arrangement was over a month behind schedule and all attempts to find out what was happening fell on stony ground, but on Wednesday afternoon I had a phone call offering an appointment for today.

‘Will I get a letter as usual?’ I asked. ‘No,’ replied the man making the offer, ‘but you might get a text reminder.’ Having received neither letter nor text message by this morning, I was in neurotic mood. I was feeling quite sure that I would go to all the trouble to prepare for and keep the appointment (you know – nothing to eat for at least four hours, making sure that there’s plenty of fluid in the bladder to keep it well inflated, driving twenty miles plus a side trip to Ashbourne to buy a box of Lindor chocolates for the radiographers, using twenty miles worth of petrol, probably having to queue for a parking space and then pay for it, negotiating the rabbit warren to get to the CT suite, etc) only to find that I had no appointment after all. I would have been a little miffed.

But no. The appointment was safely on the computer and the road ahead was clear. The two radiographers were an absolute delight and virtually squealed with joy when I handed over the box of chocolates. ‘You’ve made my day,’ said the younger and prettier of them (and that, as you might expect, made mine.)  And then Maria, the Portuguese nurse who did the cannula fixing and general conveyancing, and with whom the chocolates had naturally been shared, told me off for not having given them to her. But she was only joking and told me that I knew how to please a woman. I declined to agree, of course. (What I actually said was that I was too old to care any more.) ‘Give a woman chocolates,’ she said, ‘and you will melt her heart.’ Why didn’t anyone tell me that when I was twenty? I finally learn how to melt hearts just when it’s too late to bother. Life eh? Maybe next time.

And so the difficult day went down not in wan and weariness, but in smiles, pleasant connections, and good grace. Thank heaven the gnome didn’t fancy a road trip.