My best Duke of Edinburgh salute for my oncologist

In the waiting room I thought about the Duke of Edinburgh. In particular, I pictured him saluting the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. In 1915 Colonel Maud’huy told his assembled French soldiery: ‘Many men salute correctly, very rare are those who salute beautifully… One could say that the salute is the hallmark of education.’ Maud’hay was an aristocrat-dandy. He would say that. Yet a simple practised movement can be powerfully expressive and every year the Duke of Edinburgh’s respectful, comradely martial salute was a thing of beauty. I looked forward to it. And every year, as he stepped backwards and saluted Lutyens’s sublime pylon, the execution was so reliably superior to the others’ that I laughed.

Then this broken-down old Frenchwoman came and sat opposite me, rummaged urgently in her handbag, looked up, saw me, greeted me, and said: ‘Bloody cancer.’ To this I gave my wholehearted agreement with mute but wild nodding of my head. And then I returned in my mind to Whitehall and my mental video of the Duke of Edinburgh saluting the Cenotaph. I laughed again and was glad for the Duke that he was sufficiently recovered to leave hospital and return home.

Now the woman looked up from the wreckage of her handbag and spoke again. ‘Bloody Covid!’ she said. I replied with some violent eye-rolling and my current favourite stock phrase, ‘Quelle affaire!’, which seemed to satisfy her.

Now my masked, white-coated Marseillais oncologist came out of his door and invited me to return with him into his office. With my ludicrous French and his broken English, Jean-Laurent and I manage to get by. I have sat in his office half a dozen times now for halting chats about defeating or at least retarding my cancer.