Last Requests

Hospital radio is popularly considered the kind of light hearted charitable pursuit that you ought to do aged about 16 if you one day want to work in media. It fills a valuable place on your CV above paper round and below production company intern, but that isn’t the reason I started doing it, and it isn’t the reason I continue to. 

To broadcast on hospital radio you first have to go round the wards and collect requests from patients. This is at once the most horribly sobering and incongruously hilarious thing to do. It’s hilarious because what you are asking is so entirely out of place. People look up at you, as they lie there, dying, and you have to cheerily enquire what sort music they would like to hear this evening. Many of the ones that are relatively well will ask for something, but most of the time they just shake their heads sadly, sometimes they will actually laugh in a hollow, derisive way as if to say “Here I am with a few precious weeks left and you are asking me if I want to listen to The Beach Boys? Get out, just get out!”

I go through this whole darkly comic musical charade one a week and as a result I am now an expert on the various labyrinthine wards of my local hospital. It’s part of radio policy that you aren’t supposed to know what each ward caters for, but eventually you start to pick up clues. The amount of pink and scrunched newborns on the neonatal ward, for example, that’s a big clue. The lack of limbs (and profusion of iodene covered stumps) on the amputation ward, thats a big clue. What all the wards seemingly have in common, though, regardless of specialism, is pipes.

I am now an expert on the varieties of plastic piping that can come out of any one individual. I’ve seen so many pipes. Pipes from mouths, noses, sides of throats, pipes disappearing ominously into torsos, and each one filled with viscous liquids of interesting and organic colours ranging from your standard red to a hideous bile-y green. I don’t know if these pipes are syphoning things off or pumping things in - but they are probably doing both. At first I tried not to look at the pipes as I found them actively distressing but now I can’t stop looking at them. Equally, what you learn over time is that the pipes themselves are excellent conversational fodder. “Nice pipe” you can say to a patient who is trying to remember the name of that singer they like. “Thanks” they will say, and sometimes they will lift up their gown to show you some more of their pipes, or the raw, scared surface of their stomach “Heres the operation I had done at Guys” they will say proudly, and after the first few times you will be able to say “Oh! That’s interesting.” rather than just veering away and blindly retching. 

Oftentimes the pipe-people, or patients as they prefer to be known, will try to communicate with you on a subject that isn’t music. This is a bad sign. Many of these pipe-people are old and heavily medicated and their conversation is surreal at best and often full of anger. You just have to vaguely listen to their ramblings and try to back away at the first available opportunity. The other day a woman spent a good ten minutes (though it felt infinitely longer) just rambling vitriolically on. I couldn’t pick much sense out of it. But I think she might have been asking me to avenge her death. She spent a good deal of time talking about the Medway Crown Court system, and how they had wronged her family. She had written down the names of wicked judges on a napkin and tried to get me to take it so I could track them down and - I suppose - kill them.

Another man, before I could even open my mouth to say “Hospital radio, can we play you a song tonight?” screamed...

“I’m not mad!”

Retrospectively, this should have been a huge clue. That and the fact that his feet were fastened to the bed with cloth loops.

There followed a five minute exchange in which he offered the immortal words...

“Have you seen the ghost what walks around this hospital? Some say he is massive and covered in black hair but others say he is small and completely hairless!”

Well, one or the other...

The most worrying thing is that these people aren’t even mentally ill, or rather, they aren’t first and foremost mentally ill. There is a whole other area given over to those who are. Diamond Ward... 

Because one of my most persistent fears is that I will one day go completely mental and end up in a facility like Diamond Ward, I try to avoid collecting the song requests of its residents. On the few occasions that I’ve gone in I’ve seen myself reflected in their sedated, chemically-glazed eyes, as well as in their fondness for Joni Mitchell (who I love and who, if requests are anything to go by, is now the Grande Dame of acute mental illness) My decision to steer clear of the ward was cemented when a radio-collegue breezily recounted the following...

“I was in Diamond Ward and one of the patients had got into the hallway and was crawling on all fours, but backwards, with her back arched and her head towards the ceiling, just making her way along the ward towards the hall, screaming quietly to herself.”

I couldn’t imagine how someone could scream quietly and I didn’t want to.

“So I went and told one of the nurses “I think we could do with your help out here, one of the people in your care is traveling crab-wise into the outside world” and she just nodded at me and said “Oh, don’t mind her, she is just having her ‘funny five minutes’”

I would have said that once you have been admitted in to a NHS psychiatric facility and are crawling about exorcist fashion the phrase ‘funny five minutes’ doesn’t fully encompass the seriousness of your situation any more. But then, I’m no doctor.

The studio from which the radio show is actually broadcast is deep within the bowels of the hospital itself and while I want to say that it is much less unnerving than the wards, it really isn’t. 

For one thing they built it next to the morgue.

On the other side of the morgue is the cafe. 

I wish I were joking.

Sadly, you aren’t really allowed to reference the morgue during the show itself. It’s difficult to know how to close each broadcast and while I usually end on a Leonard Cohen song (to ease patients into the evening and also to finish off any stragglers) I spent ages trying to convince co-workers to let me end the show with the line “That’s it from the request show tonight, I’ve been Anna Savory and I’ve got to go now as I can hear movement from the morgue...” But there were no takers. Too disturbing, they said. 

The irony of this, though, is that the phrase ‘too disturbing’ takes on whole new levels of meaning once you have been exposed to the radio station jingles, which are, really, deeply distressing. Call to mind the incredibly grating and nerve-jangling affairs that are professional radio jingles. And then try to imagine amateur versions of those. These jingles rub against your soul.

The jingle that precedes my show explains the fact that people (ie. me) will be coming round the wards to collect song requests, but rather than just saying “People will be coming round the ward to collect your song requests” a pre-recorded mock-cheerful voice proclaims “look out for our representatives around the wards who will be armed with their highly dangerous clip-boards and dodgy smiles”

If all of your essential organs didn’t twist in on themselves while reading that you may be unembarrassable! What exactly is a dodgy smile? And why does it make me sound like a colossal pervert? Why are clip-boards dangerous? That doesn’t even make sense! It is all said in a really jocular way as if to imply ‘Ha, ha, of course our workers would never leer in a faintly sexual fashion at you and then beat you to death with their clipboards’ But whose mind goes there anyway? Who needs to be reassured that that won’t happen? Why even imply it? Every time I hear the jingle it makes me long for the chance to compose my own.

Admittedly it would just be a few ukelele chords and then an 80s style female backing group singing “Look out for Anna, she’ll be starin’ at yah pipes” but in a way isn’t that vastly superior and more accurate than what is currently in place? I can’t really complain though, it’s entirely voluntary work, I could leave any time if I genuinely found the jingles too painful, or the patients too cryptically disturbing or Diamond Ward too unsettlingly familiar. But it is good fun, in a faintly ghoulish way, and also sometimes you discover new music... or new information about pipes.

Anyway, I must go now, I hear movement from the morgue.

Not Yet Dead

This new year I find myself unexpectedly alive.

For reasons I can no longer remember I've been convinced for almost half my life that I wouldn’t live to see 2013. Not in any serious way (and certainly not to such an extent that I spent 2012 doing anything useful or having memorable experiences), but in a dull, nagging, back of the mind sort of a way that every so often wormed its way horribly to the forefront.

I would consult calendars for important dates and then mentally whisper to myself...

“Right George’s birthday is the sixth. Oh! and look... only three months left now till you’re dead.”

Similarly, I would often look at my debit cards and seeing that they had to be renewed in 2013, inwardly dismiss it. 

“Ah, well, that doesn’t matter, I’ll be dead by then.”

The most worrying thing about my ever encroaching death (besides the manifest worry of the entire situation) was that I didn’t know what form it was going to take and I was really very keen for it to be something dignified - like a mafia shoot out or a ceremonial bonfire - and not something stupid and posthumously embarrassing like an severe allergy to a certain type of latex, or one of those toilet related deaths. 

I mention this because I do have a considerable track record in this area... 

Once, aged five, I almost killed my self with a Cadbury’s Creme Egg. This sounds unlikely and baffling but I was an unlikely and baffling child. Some one passed the egg back to me on a long car journey and, overcome by its sudden glorious appearance, I jammed it whole, into my mouth - where it lodged. Tiny jaws forced open around the confectionary, unable to talk or breath, I looked around in frenzied panic. I tried to cry out but the egg just got in the way. Eventually, alerted by my muffled screams my sister clambered into the backseat and jimmied the egg free with two biros. (I am still of the opinion that Cadbury’s subsequent “How Do You Eat Yours” campaign, in which the option “by cramming it whole into my maw” was conspicuously absent, was designed to reduce the number of complaints the corporation received from the mothers of terminally greedy children.)

A few years later while playing with my second cousin off the coast of the Isle of White I almost killed myself again but this time with a novelty floatation aid rather than with an chocolate egg. We had devised a game wherein one of us would hold a rubber ring up and the other one would dive through it into the water beyond like some kind of beautiful human dolphin. Dolphins were, at the time, very much in vogue among the eight year old community. You wouldn’t give the time of day to someone who didn’t have at least one dolphin themed item about their person. I think I may even have been wearing a dolphin adorned swimming suit at the time. Our respective parents, foreseeing injuries, had banned the game but since it allowed us to emulate our animal idols we willfully ignored them.

“Dolphins don’t need safety, Shannon” I said to my cousin “and they don’t care for rules.”

Convinced, Shannon, ever lithe and graceful, managed to clear the hole in the centre of the ring without touching the sides, and a few seconds later she surfaced - chattering - more dolphin than girl. Driven by jealousy I thrust the ring into her hand and positively launched myself at it. Possibly screaming whatever I considered to be the dolphin war cry to be. Sadly though I did not have the physique of a dolphin but rather the physique of a girl who habitually crammed creme eggs into her face. I got halfway through the ring and there I lodged.

In shock, or more probably, amusement Shannon let go and the ring slowly toppled forward with me crammed helplessly inside it so that I was plunged upside down into the water, my head and torso submerged and my legs feverishly beating the air. 

During the long minutes that followed Shannon never once tried to right me. I don’t know why this was, perhaps she had always hated me, or perhaps the image of me upside down trapped, drowning in a rubber ring was so hilarious as to impede any useful actions on her part. Maybe she had just mentally wandered off into her own happy dolphiny thoughts and wasn’t really looking at what I was doing. We were eight after all. Either way things were looking distinctly grim, and my increasingly paniced thrashings (though dramatic and heartfelt) were effective neither in righting me nor releasing me from my inverted rubbery prison. 

I would like to say that eventually my sister waded in and jimmied me out of the ring with two massive biros, but what actually happened was that a wave caught me, dashed me painfully against the sea bed and I came up the right way round, hit Shannon (no, I didn’t, but retrospectively I really should have) prized the ring from me, and swam for land making a mental note to end my love affair with dolphins. For the next four or five years I opted for horses instead. Horses do need safety, I reasoned, and they care very much for rules. 

Horses - those most cautious and reasonable of animals.

Naturally there has never been a horse that wasn’t stark staring mental. Everybody who has ever ridden one has a considerable arsenal of almost-death anecdotes, but here is the difference... anyone can fall off a horse, or nearly decapitate themselves riding fast under trees, or have their horse bolt, but to be hit in the head with the cast-iron shoe of the horse you are riding... that’s like the start of a joke. But such was my third near miss.

I could perhaps understand being hit with the shoe of a horse in front of you, that's undignified but at least logical. Take a moment to calculate the physics of what happened to me. A shoe comes off under a horse and yet rather than just staying buried in the mud or being flung backwards, it flys, presumably with a boomerang-like trajectory, almost directly upwards, before curving sharply and unnaturally round and catching the rider of same horse hard across the temple. The most baffling thing was that, when I rode back to the stable with a gashed and heavily bleeding head and a now slightly off balance horse they told me that all their animals were very well shod and what I had probably been hit with was some ‘regular (flying!) scrap metal’ - or possibly - they were willing to conceed - a small piece of hoof.

To me this was a strangely telling statement “No, I don’t think he lost a shoe, we take very good care of our horses feet and they are all immaculately shod - it might have been a bit of hoof though - despite us caring for our horses hooves very well sometimes they do just crumble away. It’s one of those things with horses, occasionally their hooves fall apart.”

Anyway, the point of all this is that it is at present 2013, and the more perceptive among you will have noticed that I’m not dead, either by the ridiculous means that my track record implies were likely to finish me off or by other more pedestrian methods. My death neither took the form of embarrassing toilet/egg/shoe related misdemeanor nor dramatic mafia show down, because it didn't come at all.

This is, on the whole, good news, but it's also slightly disorientating in that I have to come to terms with the fact that I was wrong. Here is 2013 - I’ve been mistaken in my beliefs for about ten years. I feel like I’m coming out a cult.

Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things any one of the above events was supposed to kill me and I simply dodged the pre-destined bullet. I'm glad I did because “Asphixiated by a creme egg”, “Drowned upside down nr Shanklin” and “Stray horse shoe to the head” don’t look dignified when written up in an obituary notice. But it makes you think, doesn't it? 

Well perhaps it doesn't, either way. I don't really have the time to philosophise at any great length as I now have to renew all three of my debit cards.

Anyway, Happy New Year!