And another thing.

More about my hospital stay 8 October 2025 to 24 December 2025

My battered memory keeps offering up new pictures about the time when I was Banged Up in hospital. Some of them are incomprehensible, some quite dull. Some of the memories have pixies in them or the Talking Goat I got quite friendly with. I often couldn’t tell the difference between hallucinations and real people which made it interesting.

For instance why do I have memories about taking my clothes off and wandering around the ward with not much on, as in semi-naked. The nurses really didn’t like this kind of behaviour which I think was quite early in my stay. They used to tell me off for removing my clothes and leaving them everywhere. They also sighed a lot. I have literally no idea why I kept taking my clothes off. It’s not something I would normally do, believe me, although I lost my shame about nakedness many years before when I worked as a Life Model in a local authority art class. I used to give the students special karate poses which they seemed to like because of my ability to hold a karate stance. Also because I had muscles which I have always just grown without a lot of weight-lifting.

My daughter now does power-lifting and looks amazing. My grown-up sons do a variety of martial arts. One of my brothers had the physique of a Greek god when he was young and is still pretty fit (the other got the skinny Irish gene). I reckon that we acquired the muscle gene from my Hungarian grandfather who legendarily went over the top with a WWI machine gun in a battle-rage because his friend had been killed. Those early machine guns were incredibly heavy.

So yes, obviously I was showing off but why that way? Was it in protest at the hideousness of the pink nighties supplied to us? Was it because I was bored (a very dangerous condition for me because I’m liable to do literally anything to kill the boredom, even now I’m an old fart)? Probably, that’s why I started forward-rolling up and down the ward. Certainly that’s why I sang loudly in the middle of the night.

Another thing was my hair which I normally keep short (ie “short back and sides, longer on top”) but it grew and grew until the longer-on-top bit kept falling over my face and getting in my eyes. No, of course there wasn’t a hairdresser/barber who could come into the ward and do some topiary. Apparently there had been somebody but she was stopped by the Management, no idea why. It couldn’t have been overcharging because she did it for free. I have quite a lot of fast-growing thick hair (from my Irish grandmother) and various kindly nurses kept trying to give me a topknot which always fell over or escaped from the scrunchy and made me laugh.

And then there was the issue of tooth cleaning.

After I’d been in jail (sorry, hospital) for some weeks, I realised that I hadn’t brushed my teeth since before I’d got got there. At first I’d been busy not-sleeping in the high dependency ward, half-crazy with the constant beeping, and not-eating to unintentionally scare my family, but once I’d decided I preferred eating to being tube-fed, despite the dreadful nature of the food, I learned that a toothbrush and toothpaste tube were rather hard to find. I asked nurses, I asked visitors, I even asked doctors. Nobody had a toothbrush on them. I asked my children to bring in a toothbrush for me, but no toothbrush appeared and the health assistants didn’t have any toothbrushes either. People would promise to bring me a toothbrush but they generally forgot.

The scarcity of toothbrushes was partly my fault because if I ever actually got a toothbrush I would forget to hide it away and so it would succumb to the ferocious tidiness of everybody in uniform and would be thrown out. Even if I hid the precious toothbrush in a bag, the bag itself would be chucked out at the earliest opportunity by a passing health assistant.

It felt like there was moss growing on my teeth.

I escaped officially on the 24^th December 2025 and started brushing my teeth again which made my gums bleed a lot.

I’m sure nobody actually wanted me to have gingivitis, but after I’d gone to a proper dental appointment at the beginning of April, the hygienist thought it was a bit of a miracle that I didn’t have gingivitis. She said I must have started with fairly healthy clean teeth for that to happen.

Hah!