Half Life – 25 – the card
April 16th, 2021
It’s the adaptability to so many situations which makes it valuable as a source of endless, childish, entertainment. Of the few benefits bestowed by long term illness and partial disability, it’s the most useful and powerful. Being the trump card of all super trumps, caution is needed. Play it too often and eye-rolling contempt, in a way only teenagers can really pull off, results from those it is used on. Played at the right time, in the right way, nothing can compete, and responses fall before they are uttered.
Slipping the ‘cancer card’ into a discussion at just the right moment is the pinnacle of skill, and practice is needed to ensure maximum impact. For the beginner, the ‘cancer card’ comes with a few physical forms to support it. Most famous is the much coveted and envied blue parking badge. So much so that parking in a disabled bay, even in an empty car park, is obligatory - just to show you can. Over time, other games become possible. Top of the pile is pulling into a disabled space in a busy car park and waiting for just the moment when the parking attendant approaches and, seeing no blue badge, enthusiastically whips out the pad from its holster in expectation of bagging a victim. Timing is vital. The blue badge needs to slip into the windscreen just as they go for the second look and reach for their pen. Watching that smile of ticket-writing triumph drop away, reminiscent of all those moments returning to a car one minute over the time on your ticket as the yellow fine is being stuck to the windscreen, makes it all worthwhile.
Chemo patients also get a card to carry which, on presentation at A&E or any other medical institution, rockets you past the queue, ahead of everyone except sick babies and blood-spurting knife wounds, and into a room of your own. It works in doctor’s surgeries too when it’s crowded, but not in pubs where sympathy for beer drinking chemo patients is not high enough to surrender a place at the bar. The most dramatic responses come from the recently acquired ‘I am radioactive’ card, issued to those injected with fizzing isotopes. Generating an immediate involuntary step back, polite questions follow as the other person tries to put as much of a gap as possible between you and them without looking like they are edging away too obviously. It’s a card worth keeping in the wallet and waving about long after the seven days ‘carry by’ date has expired, if only to keep others to the social distancing rules.
Having mastered the physical card manifestations, graduation to simple verbal versions for casual encounters becomes possible. There exists an irresistible urge within people to comment to a stranger on crutches. Needing a quick one-line reply, it’s perfect for the trump card’s appearance. Filling up with petrol, a process not designed to be combined with stick-walking, followed by a lengthy hobble to pay, results in at least one encounter with a want-to-be forecourt comedy genius every time. The talent on show rarely gets above wondering if the football was too hard, if crutches are needed for a stubbed toe, or if there is a need for a better skiing instructor. Guffaws of laugher follow as they speed past, making sure they get to the front of the queue to pay. With a gentle and forgiving smile, to go with the louder than it needs to be response of “no, it’s cancer”, the card is played. Faces freeze, embarrassment climbs, and, with a ‘oh, sorry mate’, they make as fast a getaway as possible, diverting themselves around the shelves of pot noodle to be sure to avoid eye contact.
Above all other powers the cancer card bestows is its ability to side-step, without an ounce of guilt, some of the more traumatic parental obligations. Top of the list is the abomination that is camping. More specifically, the idea of a camping holiday – an oxymoronic concept if there ever was one. There is nothing less holiday like than camping. It’s fine for important polar expeditions, soldiers in war, and emergencies after earthquakes. Voluntarily doing it, with the idea of it being fun, is crazy. A festival of pretend fun, uncomfortable sleeping, tepid coffee, one pan army type food, and smelling of woodsmoke, it has no place in any real holiday. Heaven forbid someone in a tent nearby, or, worse, as part of your group, has brought a guitar and thinks singing ‘knocking on heaven’s door’ at two in the morning while swaying in a mystic way is in any way relaxing or welcome.
Hotels, pubs, and B&Bs, all with indoor toilets, plumbing, real cooking facilities, walls, and warmth, exist for a reason. Camping is one step back from a cave, where good ones have at least three out of the four solid walls needed. Pre-cancer, the pressure to attempt camping as a family holiday was growing. Friends did it, I was told, and some of them went so far as to undermine resistance by offering to lend equipment and suggesting places to go. In a flash, with the timely production of the cancer card into a discussion about holidays three years ago, all notion of camping was removed forever. It has never dared make a reappearance.
Even the awe-inspiring powers bestowed by the cancer card, if overused, can be neutralised. Careless, mundane, use to encourage coffee making, wine bringing, room tidying, rubbish take out, or to gain command of the television control to watch University Challenge, has worn away its magic on The Boys and The Wife. When used for inappropriate domestic emotional blackmail, it bounces off their defences as they recognise the feeble attempts to manipulate them for what they are. They are now masters of the most effective countermeasure against inappropriate playing of the cancer card - a solid single finger salute.
your humour is delightful , heart warming and thought provoking
Brilliant! My favourite piece to date. Black humour for the win!x