Torquay trauma

When I got back from Pamplona I hadn’t slept in a bed or washed my hair for a week. There was a red stain around my neck where my sweat had mixed with the dye in my St Fermin neckerchief. I was badly sunburned. There was a suppurating graze on my shoulder and a cold sore on my lip. Also, near the end of the feria I’d been robbed of all my money and credit cards by two, or it might have been one, very small women and I was destitute as well as dirty. Imagine how my heart leapt, then, when I walked in the door and was told that while I was away Uncle Jack had been complaining loudly about pains in his chest and was in hospital for ‘tests’.

I’ve not inherited a thing from anybody so far. Not a sausage. But Uncle Jack is 93 and worth, we reckon, about a mil and a half before inheritance tax. And I know for a solid fact that I’m down in his will for £10,000 of it. Of course I realise that to many of you ABs this isn’t much. But I am a petit bourgeois. I come from a long line of bank clerks. And, as the late Joseph Brodsky pointed out in this incredibly authoritative essay of his I happened to pick up the other day, my social class is distinguishable from the rest in that it is the only class that thinks ten grand is a lot of money. I had a quick wash then went to visit Uncle Jack to assess how long he had left.

Even before I reached the ward I could hear him shouting. He was sitting up in bed in stripy pyjamas, incandescent with rage, yelling at a nursing assistant.