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. After that things got rather more serious, and I didn’t much like being registered by the typist next door as a ‘Retired Professor at the University of Cambridge’. I didn’t tell her that; la doctora did, and I remonstrated with her afterwards as she drove me home. I mean I don’t imagine for one moment that Porterhouse Blue has made me desperately popular in Cambridge. You had to be a virtual moron to get a third in social anthropology in 1951. Cut the ‘virtual’: a moron. And even in these halcyon days of educational cock-ups, I can’t see Estelle Morris approving the appointment of a third as a professor at Cambridge. La doctora did point out that professeur in Catalan merely means teacher. ‘But I taught at the tech, not at the university,’ I protested. ‘There’s a world of difference.’