Standing Room

6 June 2009

It’s always the smallest thing that tips one over the edge.

It’s always the smallest thing that tips one over the edge. This week I cracked. I sat on the pavement outside King Edward VII’s hospital and shamelessly sobbed. My husband was ill with septicaemia, and I was desperate to get to him. I was panicked, worried sick and keen to get up to his room to make sure he was all right after an interminable night spent apart. I’d found a parking space — this particular grid of private medical care in the heart of London offers perhaps the last bastion of dependably available parking spaces — and hurriedly began the endless process of pay-parking by telephone.

I’d found my glasses, found the sign, texted my four-digit location code, confirmed my car’s registration, entered the number of minutes I wished to park, and was waiting for confirmation. Mobile tucked under my chin, I grabbed bags out of the car and was already halfway up the stairs to the hospital when I was electronically informed that my credit card had been rejected. Assuming there had been some technical mistake, I went through the whole process again. Crossly. This time I was transferred to a ‘technical adviser’ (aka a human) who told me I had ‘insufficient funds’, i.e. exceeded my overdraft limit. It was the straw that broke this camel’s back. A wave of impotence swept over me, and I crumbled. I sat on the pavement, put my head in my hands and howled like a baby. An elderly woman on crutches poked my shoulder and asked if I was all right.

‘No.’ I sniffed. ‘I just want to get to my husband and I can’t.’

‘Neither can I,’ she announced, producing a clean tissue out of her pocket and wordlessly handing it to me. ‘I don’t own or indeed know how to use one of those wretched portable telephones and I’m too old to learn. I simply have to kiss my husband before he goes down for surgery.’

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