Alfie fails to learn what it’s all about

One of the more tedious downsides of getting on a bit is that one’s ongoing interface with the medical profession increases exponentially. For some months now, those who must be obeyed have been giving me a hard time about my blood pressure readings. The reign of those who insist we must live forever is a long way from over, and so I have spent the last 24 hours with a bp monitor strapped to my unwilling body.

It is an infernal thing. Being technologically advanced and generally cutting-edge, it gets things wrong, corrects itself, doubles up on readings, and crushes my left arm in the most unforgiving manner every 20 minutes. You can try to explain to doctors until your bp is 199/123 that this sort of thing raises the blood pressure, but the bland answer given back is, “We take all these things into account”.

Bollocks they do. For example, I’d had a full workout at the gym before being hooked up to this mood voyeur yesterday. That would reduce my readings by a good 30%…but nobody asked me about it.

The nurses who handle all this stuff are, as ever, polite, tolerant, kind, and willing to answer every question, however f**kwitted it might be. This contrasts 100% with the doctors, who treat almost every enquiry as the sort of impertinence that would’ve earned the death penalty in mediaeval England. It is a funny thing with doctors, but they veer between impenetrable complexity about the diastolic input reading on the one hand, and “So, how are the waterworks then?” on the other. Whenever faced with doctors trying to explain why I should obey without question, I always feel emboldened to ask when was the last time they had a full enaema to reverse that pesky up-themselves condition.

Anyway, with great relief I pitched up at the Group Practice this afternoon to have the bp Reader General removed. As I waited in the area designated for calm contemplation prior to consultation, little Alfie was busy at his chosen task of wrecking the place. I know his name was Alfie, because his wide-eyed, gum-chewing mum kept saying, “No Alfie”. The thing was, the more she said “no”, the more it became obvious that Alfie knew only too well how this word held no penalty at all. On and on Alfie went, smashing little wooden hammers into anti-kid reinforced glass, and chucking hard-plastic puzzle balls at Alfie-proof ceiling lights.

The penalty I had in mind for Little Alfie after ten minutes of this crap is of too dark a nature to record here. All I can tell you is that his exuberance was far too much for Christian patience…especially as I’m not a Christian, and I have little or no patience with small destruction machines getting little or no social guidance from their mothers.

I don’t mention this just for literary amusement. I’m using this episode shamelessly to help illustrate why, with every year that passes, I realise more and more the error of those more liberal ways of my youth. I looked at Alfie’s mum, and saw a fellow human being not yet ready for normal social intercourse. As she must have been at least thirty, I wondered what on earth kind of guidance she in turn had received in her childhood home. Yet here she was – a full-blown mother – in charge of bringing up the next generation. I felt a ghost-arm rummaging for the key to that cupboard marked with a skull and crossbones.

Within a few short years, it will be too late for Little Alfie. One day, he will be Big Alfie….bashing the bejesus out of anyone in his way. And I do not doubt that, if (as seems very likely) he one day machine-guns the entire panel of judges on Britain’s got X-Factor Talent to death, it will be purely and simply because they all said “No Alfie”.

There is a very odd mismatch between this savage kiddy attack on all things benign, and the attempt by Health & Safety to render all things potentially dangerous benign. The obvious result of this must surely be to produce a world in which millions of Little Alfies roam free to climb small walls topped with rubber barbed wire, so that – after they’ve emptied the factory safe of its contents – a bewigged judge can then rule that they should get an A** in safe-cracking, and the site owner five years in a corrective institution specialising in the reconfiguration of anyone born before 1975.