Journalism

The Spectator article 25th September 2024

The politics of the hospital ward

How to be a courteous patient

Before the op, I was going to write a jaunty piece about how getting yourself ready to go into hospital is like getting ready to go to a wedding. Both require new clothes – that is unless you feel confident that your jimjams – dressing gown, slippers and, for goodness’ sake, knickers – are all presentable.

Now, back home after quite a major op for bowel cancer, I’m not feeling quite so jaunty. At a time when the NHS is described as broken and in need of reform, I know I’ve been lucky. I was diagnosed early, had a brilliant consultant surgeon whose communication skills were equal to his surgical skills, and a specialist nurse who was able to talk me through my many anxieties. If I’m less jaunty and find it hard to talk about my time in Ward 23 of Edinburgh’s Western General Hospital, it’s partly because recovery is slow and partly because, for a dozen days, Ward 23 became my home and the other patients became – well, my clan. There’s a kind of unique and slightly strange intimacy about sharing a ward.

I think that maybe the world is divided into those who, given a choice, would prefer to be in a ward and those who want a room to themselves. I’m a ward woman myself. If I’m going to be ill, I like company. Also, drama. There are five of us in Ward 23 – five women with bowel problems in a ward with one toilet. Four of us are over 70 (the eldest being 87), and one is in her fifties.

My bed in Ward 23 is by the window. I feel I have been gifted with sky. Beyond the sky is a view of the Pentlands (Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘hills of home’), and on a sunny day, looking down on the roof of the Hospital Research Office, I sometimes see a russet fox settling down for a snooze. As do I.

A ward is a new country which you need to navigate. Hell, it is a new country. Firstly, you need to suss out the hierarchy of nurses, nurse assistants, visiting doctors, and top-of-the-grade consultants. Green scrubs seem to equal doctors. Green scrubs travel the wards in packs, hats still worn as if they’ve just this minute come from an operating theatre. Some are maybe students. Consultants are known by their lack of any uniform. If a man appears in jeans and a T-shirt, he’s probably a top consultant, surgeon or professor.

Lower down the order are the cleaners, who arrive early, avoid eye contact, and need to be tall to reach up and clean the tops of things. They possess an impressive range of mops and cloths. Last, but far from least, is volunteer Bob, who comes with a trolley of tea, coffee, soft drinks, biscuits, jokes and music. He’s reliably regular and always welcome.

But mostly your life depends on the nurses. There aren’t enough of them, and they work incredibly hard. To thrive in Ward 23, you need to become aware of change-over times, because it’s no good pressing your buzzer – and we all have a buzzer, even if at times one or other of us can’t find it, someone else will buzz for you – during change-over times. You can hear them in the distance chatting and laughing and hopefully exchanging information about their patients, not just ignoring our buzzers.

Catching the eye of a nurse has something in common with catching the eye of a waiter in a busy restaurant. In the ward, it requires tact and courtesy. The nurse may be attending someone in a worse state than you, or, irritatingly, she or he might be just chatting about grandchildren while you’re clenched in pain and desperate for help. It’s a case of choosing your moment, recognising when another patient is more needy than you.

Some nurses you take to, some you don’t. You become aware that the amount of compassion required of a nurse is beyond what most of us can manage. Then, just when you feel you’ve accomplished some kind of a relationship with one nurse, she’s off for the next three days. A new one appears, and you have to start your trying-to-be-a-good-patient routine all over again.

But the patients! The patients. My compañeros! What a conflicting relationship this is. There are those in a worse state than you. You are very, very sorry while also being glad that your own situation is not as bad.

In Ward 23, Babs, whose bed is across the way from mine, is the most ill and, from time to time, has to drag herself to the toilet, clutching her nightdress about her. Her tall, well-bred husband visits and eats her grapes. One Sunday, when Bob’s trolley is off duty, Babs’s husband brings us all coffee and takes orders for newspapers. Babs is in considerable pain. The green scrubs pull her curtains and gaggle round her like hens. We can’t help but hear that her cancer has come back. She’s also grieving because her son is moving to Dubai and taking the grandchildren with him. She won’t tell him. One morning, he brings them to visit – a trio of beautiful, blonde children. The nurses make a fuss of them. We all love and enjoy meeting them, are heartened by their youth, and hate their Dubai-deserting parents.

At the far end of the ward is Tessa (84). Tessa is getting ready to go home. Of the five of us, she seems the most quietly stoical. She has cheery pink hair, nails to match and likes cruising. She’s probably Catholic because, on Sunday, the chaplain comes, draws the curtains round her and performs some kind of mass. We all listen in. Tessa has other visitors. She tells us that they are Sisters of Mercy. Tessa has chummed up with Carol (87). The nurses love Carol because she’s a very well-behaved granny who does what she’s told. She shares her chocolate buttons. When Tessa goes home, Carol curls up on her bed and wilts.

Now there’s an empty bed in Ward 23 and Jean arrives. She’s much younger than the rest of us – probably in her early forties. Whatever’s wrong with her is very wrong and looks like the consequence of an accident. Jean can’t get out of bed on her own and has limited mobility. She has hordes of rather glamorous young visitors and loves glossy magazines. She tells me it’s going to be weeks before she can walk again. By her third day in Ward 23, she’s beginning to look a little optimistic. Perhaps it’s just her age, but she seems to be in a different order of illness to the rest of us. She’s here for the long haul.

Every day, one of the assistant nurses hands out menu sheets for breakfast, lunch and supper, and we tick our choices. Sometimes, by the time you reach supper, you can’t remember if this is what you asked for or not. And does it matter? Perhaps life itself is like a menu sheet, and we all tick our choices, though sometimes life does it for us.

The Spectator article 31st July 2024

Life in the slow lane

The quiet joys of the municipal swimming pool

Mondays and Thursdays are my days. Eight a.m. Before breakfast. The pool opens at seven for those zealous souls who like to swim before going to work. They’re gone by eight when the pool is divided into five lanes with arrows telling you which way up and which down. I like lanes. You know where you are with lanes. Let those mad fools in the fast lane work up a storm with their splashy-flashy butterfly, the sexy crawl, the somersault flip back to the beginning and off again. I’m in the slow lane. It could be a metaphor for my life.

I grew up by the sea and learnt to swim when I was six. Not in the sea but in the swimming pool where a large Scotsman in oilskins and wellies taught me how while my mother, who couldn’t swim, watched from the side. One of the selling points of the flat I bought over 20 years ago was that just across the road is one of Edinburgh’s finest Victorian swimming pools housed in a handsome sandstone brute of a building with a tower at either end, arrow slits in the basement and a great big brick chimney-stack standing 100ft proud and useless.

In the 1990s the council threatened to sell it but such was the protest that after a £5 million renovation, Glenogle Swim Centre emerged restored, its pool hall with its cast-iron columns and squiggly capitals, its wrap-around balcony, its glass skylight and clerestory windows made beautiful. The light is such as to give you the illusion you’re swimming under the sky.

Designed by the Edinburgh City Architect, Robert Morham, Glenogle Swim Centre began life c. 1900 in response to the 1846 Act to Encourage the Establishment of Public Baths and Wash-houses. It took another 20 plus years for the sport of swimming to supersede washing. A lot more than swimming goes on here now. Yoga, pilates, body balance, dance – you name it, there’s a class in it. Plus a gym and a weights room.

I’m a lazy swimmer. Some years ago I used to do 20 lengths – 15 breaststroke, five crawl. Now I seem to be down to 12, 14 on a good morning. There’s a special clock that measures your speed. I ignore it. Nor do I bother with the sauna or steam room. Sweating doesn’t appeal to me. I swim. I chat. I people-watch. (Though given a wish, it would be to master the underwater somersault.)

When, after lockdown, the Swim Centre nervously opened, scrubbed to an inch of itself, it did so with rigid rules. No stopping. No chatting. No hair spray. No anything. But the chat, the camaraderie with the regulars, the people-watching is a major part of the pleasure of the Swim Centre. It comes with the bonus of feeling you are doing something both healthy and virtuous.

At eight in the morning it’s mostly the middle-aged to old who are here in a variety of bathing gear. The men in briefs, trunks or long shorts. The women for once seeming not to mind (or not too much) how they look. They’re here to swim. Take us as you find us. No competition.

Among the regulars there’s the man who swims a few lengths, climbs out and sitting with his back against one of those Victorian pillars does what look like yoga postures. Then there’s the man whose skin is entirely covered in tattoos. Another whose knees are always worryingly bandaged. I look out for the woman I call The Lady from Aberdeen who, post-swim, appears wearing a turban of wonderfully coloured towels. And I keep an eye out for C who 20 years ago I thought looked like The Prince of the Lilies and who is still here, tall and lithe if a little less princely. I miss Singing Jimmy who used to serenade all of us with Sinatra’s ‘Songs for Swingin Lovers’ and I chat to S who aims at an amazing 40 lengths if she doesn’t lose count.

There are always one or two pool attendants good at welcoming (and hopefully rescuing if needs be) sometimes fending off possible boredom by doing their own fitness exercises, like counting steps while going round and round and round the pool. Earlier this year someone set up a help-yourself bookshelf in the entrance hall. Book addict as I am, this is a major hazard. How can I not look? And if there isn’t a book that appeals to me, might there be one for my crime-loving partner?

Then, one day someone – some literature-loving being, clearly of about the same generation as me – left a trove of old loves. Here’s the Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Here’s Elaine Feinstein’s biography of Ted Hughes, Justin Kaplan on Walt Whitman and here, for goodness sake, is Hughes’s and Heaney’s The Rattle Bag (published 1982). I’m beside myself. Here, without a doubt, is a bookish soulmate. But how to recognise him/her among the unclothed swimmers? Does he/she come in the night? The afternoon? When? For weeks I look out for more books from the same source. But it’s over. He/she has stopped, has probably finished a clear-out or handed on the library of someone long dead. There’s no more. I’ll never know who.

And maybe that’s one of the nice things about a swimming pool. In swimming costumes or trunks, everyone here is stripped of identity. We are all just swimmers. Come nine o’clock and children from various local schools arrive. They’re rowdy and lovely; their bodies straight, young, beautiful. Their excited voices echo in the arc of the pool hall. There’s always at least one who would rather not be there, one excruciatingly embarrassed, one a natural water baby. They tell us what we have almost forgotten, how beautiful we once were, how amazing it is to learn to swim. We hurry away.

Adult Fiction

Short Stories

Many of Diana’s stories have been published in magazines and anthologies and read on BBC Radio 4.

My Father As An Ant & Other Stories (Postbox Press 2017)

                                                             A few copies left available direct from the author

Essays

Late Style

an essay based on the poems in Second Wind.    BBC Radio 3  26.4.17

Asking the right questions

an essay on being a cub reporter.

Royal Literary Fund online magazine Spring 2017

Poetic Science

a year spent in the Chemistry department of Edinburgh University.

Chemistry World.  Nov. 2009

Edward Arlington Robinson: a Poet's Life

By Scott Donaldson. The Dark Horse, Winter 2007/8

Halycon Days   (An Extract)  The Author, Spring 2011

          It begins when I get a job in the Literary Department of The Sunday Times. I’m shorthand-typist/secretary to the Assistant Literary Editor, J.W. Lambert and I have never been happier.  I’m happy without knowing it. I’m happy in the way you only recognise later when you’re not happy.

          I’m happy because I’m surrounded by books and because no-one minds me reading them and because for all of my 18 years I’ve been very short of books. I was sacked from my first job – an American oil company in Picadilly - for reading, so I’m not quite sure how I’ve landed this one at The Sunday Times.     

          At first I’m still so jumpy about reading, that I’m constantly poised to hide my book under the desk.  Then Jack Lambert blows in, gives me a ‘good morning’ and clearly thinks it’s the most natural thing in the world to find someone reading.  And so does the assistant Assistant Literary Editor, Michael Ratcliffe, who is not much older than me and therefore eligible only his hair’s rather lank and his waistcoat’s too tight. I can’t place him on any social scale that I recognise except I think he’s a Cambridge grad which puts him right beyond my ken. I’m almost engaged to G but still very alert to eligibility. Though like much else, I’ve got this badly wrong because Michael is gay.

          Actually everyone here is socially beyond my ken.  That’s because I’m bourgeois to the rubber tips of my high heels and I’ve never known the likes of this lot.  My parents - plumber’s son, tailor’s daughter -  are working class people who have climbed gauchely into the middle class on the money ladder. We haven’t two cents of culture to rub together.