Dr Simmonds chuckled drily. ‘He’s got a prostate problem too, of course. I made an appointment for him to come to the surgery for a check-up.’
As I expected, I got a call from Dad not long afterwards.
‘Old Simmonds came round today,’ he said.
‘That was nice of him,’ I said.
‘I didn’t ask him to. What’s he after?’
‘He’s not after anything. He’s your doctor. He’s just seeing that you’re all right.’
‘I think he wants to get me into hospital for an operation.’
‘No he doesn’t, Dad.’
‘He’s given me an appointment, next Monday. I don’t think I’ll go.’
‘You must, Dad. It’s just for a check-up.’
‘Yes, that’s what he said. But I know how his mind works, him and his mates at the hospital. They want to experiment on me.’
I spent several minutes trying to persuade Dad that Dr Simmonds had absolutely no motive, professional or financial, for conspiring to force an already overstretched National Health Service to operate on him, at the end of which he said, ‘You believe him, do you?’
‘Yes, Dad,’ I said.
‘Then there’s no hope for me on this earth,’ he said dolefully. ‘Harry Bates is all alone.’
I told him not to be silly.Then I offered to come down to London and escort him to the doctor’s, but he reacted angrily: ‘What d’you think I am - a child? I’m perfectly capable of going to the doctor’s on my own.’
‘Well, then, prove it,’ I said. ‘Go.’
‘I’ll see how I feel on Monday,’ he grumbled.‘Anyway, how are you?’
‘All right.’
‘You don’t sound very happy,’ he said.
No, I’m not. With a demented dad and an alienated spouse I have no reason to be. Fred is still pissed off with me for ruining the Gladeworld excursion, which I have written up as a kind of short story, to try and exorcise the humiliation and embarrassment of the experience. I think she would be not speaking to me if it wasn’t for the fact that when she does speak to me I don’t hear what she’s saying half the time. She couldn’t wait to get back to work at
Décor
, where they’re having a Sale. She leaves the house early in the morning, comes back late in the evening, cooks a perfunctory dinner, or I make one with pre-cooked chilled meals from Marks & Spencer’s; she delivers a monologue about what happened in the shop, recounting verbatim what the stroppy customer said to Jakki and what Jakki said to the stroppy customer, and what she herself said to the stroppy customer to calm her down and what she said later to Jakki to calm
her
down, all so that she doesn’t have to engage in a proper conversation with me, and then she has a bath and goes to bed early. I drink too much wine at dinner, fall asleep in front of the television, wake up feeling too alert to go to bed, and come in here to keep this record of my discontents up to date. The Christmas decorations, which must not be taken down and removed until Epiphany, provide an incongruous backdrop to my gloom as I pad around the silent house during the day, and the weather and the news do what they can to lower my spirits further. Blustery showers discourage going out, though temperatures are unusually high for the first week in January, in further confirmation of global warming. And Saddam Hussein has been hanged in a fashion that makes one of the worst tyrants of all time look dignified, courageous and abused. No, I am not happy.
I recalled an interesting observation about collocations of
happy
in a book on corpus linguistics I reviewed years ago, and after a short search I found it. In a small corpus of 1.5 million words the most frequent lexical collocates of
happy
in the three words occurring before and after it were
life
and
make.
Not surprising: we all desire a happy life, we all like things which make us happy. The next most common collocates were:
entirely, marriage, days, looked, memories, perfectly, sad, spent, felt, father, feel, home
. I am struck by how many of them are keywords in my own pursuit of happiness, or lack of it, especially the nouns:
marriage, memories, father, home.
Of the verbs,
feel
is obviously the verb most frequently combined with
happy,
counting
feel
and
felt
as one. Predictably the only adjective among the words, apart from
happy
itself, is its opposite,
sad.
It surprised me that the most common adverbs qualifying
happy
in the corpus were
entirely
and
perfectly,
rather than, say, ‘fairly’ or ‘reasonably ’. Are we ever entirely, perfectly happy? If so, it’s not for very long.The most interesting word is
days.
Not
day,
but
days.
Larkin has a wonderful poem called ‘Days’, which also contains the word
happy.
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
The familiar, nostalgic collocation
happy days
doesn’t actually occur in the poem, but it’s inevitably evoked; it echoes in our heads as we read, and reminds us of the transience and deceptiveness of happiness. The days we live in always inevitably disappoint, by not being as happy as they were, or as we falsely believe they were, in ‘the good old days’, when ‘those were the days’. But where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields
A footnote to the above: it occurred to me that negative particles might have been omitted from the analysis of collocations of
happy,
so I did a check on the small corpus I have on CD here at home, and sure enough,
entirely happy
is frequently preceded by
not
or some other negative word like
never.
But
perfectly
is usually unqualified. In fact the distribution is almost exactly equal:
not entirely happy
occurs about as often as
perfectly happy,
and
entirely happy
is as rare as
not perfectly happy.
I wonder why? Corpus linguistics is always throwing up interesting little puzzles like that. I looked up
deaf
a few years ago in the biggest corpus of written and spoken English available, about fifty million words, and the most common collocation, about ten per cent of the total, was
fall on deaf ears
(counting
fall
as a lemma, standing for all forms of the verb). Now it’s no surprise that the main contribution of
deaf
to English discourse is as part of a proverbial phrase signifying stupid incomprehension or stubborn prejudice; what’s puzzling is the verb
fall,
given that the human ear is positioned to receive sound waves from the side, not from above. And the enigma is not peculiar to English. A quick dictionary search revealed that German has
auf taube Ohren fallen
, French has
tomber dans l’oreille d’un sourd
, and Italian
cadere sugli orecchi sordi
. Subject there for another article that never got written.
5
th
January
. I had an unexpected phone call today, from Simon Greensmith, a British Council chap I haven’t been in touch with for years. He was a very friendly junior member of staff in the BC office in Madrid, who showed me round the city and took me to the best tapas bars, when I was on that lecture tour in Spain. Later he did a spell in the Council’s Specialist Tours department in London, and was instrumental in sending me to several other foreign countries, for which I was grateful. He’s now in a senior post in Warsaw, where he was calling from. After a New Year greeting and a few courtesy questions about how was I and did I have a good Christmas, he came to the point of his call. ‘A bit of an emergency, Desmond. I’m hoping you will help us out.’ He explained that a linguist at Lancaster, who had been due to do a short tour in Poland at the end of January, speaking about discourse analysis to staff and postgraduates in university English departments, had a nasty skiing accident a few days ago in the Haute-Savoie and was going to be in traction in hospital there for the next six weeks. Simon was asking if I would step into the breach. ‘It’s very short notice, I know,’ he said, ‘but it’s your field and I’m sure you’ve got lots of lectures filed away that you could use. It’s only ten days and three places, Warsaw, Lodz and Cracow. Cracow’s lovely, by the way, if you haven’t been there, European City of Culture and all that -’
‘I’ve never been to Poland before,’ I said.
‘Well, then, all the more reason. It’s a very interesting country. English language studies are booming - you’d be sure of good audiences. And it would be great to see you again.’
‘The trouble is, Simon, I don’t do this sort of thing any more. I’m too deaf.’
‘Well, I know you have a bit of a problem, but we can work round that.’
‘It’s much worse than it was when we last met,’ I said. ‘I can do a lecture of course, but I can’t hear questions.’
‘You’ll have a chairperson who will repeat them for you.’
‘But the chairperson will be Polish and speak with a thick accent which I won’t understand. The vowels will be distorted and I won’t hear the consonants,’ I said. ‘Polish itself is pretty well all consonants, isn’t it? Must be hell being a Pole with high-frequency deafness.’
Simon chuckled. ‘The language
is
a bit of a beast to learn,’ he said. ‘But look, we’ll have a break after the lectures and invite the audience to write their questions down and pass them up to you.’
He was very persistent, and in the end I agreed. The fact is I wanted to be persuaded. I wanted to go to Poland - anywhere, really, to get away from the dull routine of a house-husband, the worrying problems of a mildly demented father, and the dangerous attentions of an importunate, unscrupulous postgraduate groupie; anywhere where I would once again be respected, deferred to, entertained and looked after, with the decorum appropriate to a visiting scholar. Like a disabled cowboy moping in forced retirement, I jumped at the chance to get back in the saddle again for one last round-up. As Simon talked I already envisioned his smiling face at the airport terminal exit, with a dark-suited chauffeur beside him ready to carry my luggage to the waiting Council limousine; saw myself sipping a cocktail and receiving compliments at a post-lecture reception, dining sumptuously in an elegant, wood-panelled restaurant with white napery and shaded lamps, and being given a personal guided tour of some historic church or castle by a charming young female academic with impeccable English . . .
‘Wonderful!’ he exclaimed, when I said I would do it. ‘I’ll get on to London straight away. They’ll send you a contract and the air tickets. I’ll email the itinerary to you today, and we’ll confer next week about what lectures you might give.You can do the same ones at the three universities, of course.’
I suppose I should have consulted Fred before committing myself, but Simon was in a hurry. It was a Friday afternoon and he was anxious to secure a stand-in for the injured lecturer before the offices in London and Warsaw closed. He was off skiing himself for the weekend. (‘Cross-country,’ he said, ‘quite safe.’) I couldn’t bear the thought of the opportunity going to somebody else while I dithered; and no doubt subconsciously I didn’t want to give Fred the opportunity to talk me out of it.
When she came in and I told her I was going to Poland, she put all the arguments against the idea that I had suppressed in agreeing to go. She reminded me of the frustration and exhaustion I had complained of on returning from my last few trips abroad, mostly caused by not being able to understand what people were saying to me, not only in Q&A sessions but on every social occasion, and pointed out what an inauspicious time of year it was for such a trip - Poland would be freezing in January and travel difficult.Three places in little more than a week sounded like a gruelling schedule. I would probably catch a cold and/or succumb to a stomach upset from eating and drinking too much, as I nearly always did on such trips in the past, when I was younger and fitter and able to throw off minor indispositions. In short, she thought it was a bad idea.
‘Well, I can’t get out of it now,’ I said.
‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘Just pick up the phone.’
I told her it was too late: I couldn’t get hold of Simon again until Monday and I would feel I had really let him down, withdrawing at that point.
‘Then I’ve wasted my breath,’ she said, with a shrug. ‘You’d better tell your father, I don’t want to have to deal with his mad phone calls while you’re away.’ I said I would visit him in London before I go, and I would ask Dr Simmonds to look in on him while I’m in Poland.
6
th
January.
An email from Alex today attaching what she called a ‘preliminary draft’ of a chapter entitled ‘The Absence of “suicide” and Suicide as Absence’, with my quote from Borges as an epigraph, and a few pages of argument more or less repeating my off-the-cuff remarks in the car on Boxing Day. She asked me to tell her if I thought she was heading in the right direction and said, ‘Feel free to fill out my sketchy ideas and add any more that occur to you’ - her most blatant attempt to date to get me to write her thesis for her. I took some satisfaction in telling her that I had been invited at very short notice to give some lectures in Poland and would be fully occupied for the next two weeks preparing for that. I expected a miffed response but she replied serenely: ‘That’s OK, it can wait. I may be busy doing some preparation myself - I’m applying to do some teaching this term. Dr Rimmer is on sick leave and they’re hiring a postgrad to take over her tutorials. Congratulations on the invitation. Have a great time.’ I’m surprised that she thinks she has any chance of getting teaching work in the English Department, since it would have to be approved by Butterworth.