Diary – 26 October 2002

A glorious sunny day in Spain, and I have just been certified a genuine, card-carrying, paid-up cripple. Actually, being an old-age pensioner and a householding resident of Catalonia, I wasn’t required to pay or say anything. My doctor did the talking, and had to, because I can’t speak a word of Catalan. Anyway, it was all very pleasant except that I felt a complete fraud and thought dark thoughts about being had up for perjury. That didn’t seem likely, because the waiting-room had six people in it and they all looked perfectly healthy to me. And I did have my crutch. The examining doctor looked as though he might have a heart attack at any moment. He was a very fat and Falstaffian fellow, who didn’t bother to examine my foot. He merely looked at the X-rays and saw the four great metal staples and the two-and-a-half-inch screw in it and suggested that I’d be better off with more than one crutch.