Read Slowing Down for Free Online Page B

never heard of near Cricklewood, but there were three lots of steep stairs and I was glad of my stick. Thump thump it went, like that of Blind Pugh in the first chapter of Treasure Island , but with less sinister intimations.
    Emerging into a baking, anonymous suburb, we were immediately misdirected to the nearest taxi rank. Eventually we found the real one but only by retracing our steps and heading left instead of right. My ankles were beginning to give me gyp. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed climbing into a taxi more.
    Finally we arrived at the nursing home, a large Edwardian building with a curved forecourt. We went in, to be confronted by a very old, small, cross man in a dressing-gown whom a large African nurse took resignedly back to his room. Three minutes later he’d reappeared, making incomprehensible demands in an aggrieved treble whine.
    The nice blonde receptionist told us that Conroy had been moved only two days previously to a hospital inHampstead, an institution much closer to my house in Shepherd’s Bush.
    I have a card that conjures up taxis, ordinary London cabs, which charge the fare to an account. I got the nice receptionist to ring for one and was told it would be twenty minutes. It took an hour to materialize (‘terrible traffic, guv’). While we were waiting I sat on a narrow wall across the wide and busy road. Eventually Michael came across to me with the welcome news that the increasingly nice receptionist had asked us if we wouldn’t prefer to sit in the garden, and she’d let us know when the cab finally arrived.
    So we did, and it was like a senile version of Alice’s mad tea party. At various tables under umbrellas sat the inmates. One old woman seated by herself gobbled up a huge load of Smarties with the urgency of an animal who fears that at any moment a stronger creature could emerge from the shrubbery to drive it off and gobble them up itself. Yet the most bizarre aspect of this garden of twitchers, cursers and blank-eyed phantoms was a small party of several inmates, one of whom was wearing one of those ‘novelty hats’, a towering green topper made, I believe, from felt. ‘Well,’ as Larkin wrote, ‘we shall find out’, but in my case, I hope not! Surely all the whiskey I’ve drunk, all the cigarettes I’ve smoked, will hopefully carry me off before, unlike my hero Falstaff, I grow ‘as cold as any stone’ and (to misquote) ‘a babble of green top hats’.
    It wasn’t too far in the taxi and we quite quickly found Conroy on the fifth floor. After we left I was dying for an enormous gin and tonic. Michael’s antibiotics forbade drink so he had a bottle of still water on one of those awkward, benched, wooden tables. Then we asked the way to a rank(I’d given up my resolution to stick to public transport, free as it may be for OAPs), and were told there was one at the bottom of the long, steep hill with its fine Georgian houses. We paused so I could do one of my ten-seconds-or-else wees into a privet hedge, this time unconnected to the constabulary. No pedestrians passed on our side of the road but several cars did and probably saw what I was up to, but registered no critical disapproval or even surprise. Long ago, when I often did the same thing from being very drunk rather than from the need to get rid of excess water in the system with the aid of a nightly pill, I noticed that, wherever I was (Berkeley Square, for instance, on one bright afternoon), people just pretended I was invisible, a phantom pisser!
    We, I mean the English, have this ability to imitate the three wise monkeys. On the tube, not so long ago but before my right hand developed taxi-itis, the carriage was full of businessmen, and women who’d been shopping, when the door between the coaches opened and five youths burst in. ‘You’re a load of fuckin’ wankers!’ they yelled at us. None of the passengers, including me, seemed to hear. One man turned over a page of his Evening Standard . The lads