Raymond Briggs

I got quite a shock yesterday. I was sitting alone, reading an intellectual, fairly highbrow book and, as usual nowadays, I kept dozing off. This, of course, was due to the very unseasonal, very warm weather we have all been enduring for several weeks now.

I had heard someone calling from the back door, which in this rambling old house is quite a long way away.

I go out of the sitting room into the kitchen, then turn left and proceed to the kitchen door. Here I open the door into the passage way, then turn right, stepping over the old stone entry step, which must at one time have been the original back door, past the lavatory door immediately on the right – almost certainly the cause of this first extension. It’s incredible now to think of building a house with no lavatory.

Then I go up three very steep steps, past the bathroom door on the right and continue to one of the original back doors of the enlarged house, before the wooden shack of an extension was tacked on, containing the coal shed, now with logs in there as well. I turn right through yet another door (don’t grump, it’s only number five) into the end room – concrete floor; gigantic fridge-freezer. Then you come at last to the present back door. You could go and lie down for a rest on one of the coal heaps before opening the door to your nice new visitor.

This must be why we long ago adopted the traditional country habit of using the back door more than the front door. It also lets the visitor, having called out and received an answering distant cry, endure the tiresome journey to the sitting room. Some townies find this quaint and even amusing; others find it a bore and, if they are old, a painful bore as well.

The Friday before this, I had been feeling very depressed and even lonely. Pathetic. The whole day no one had called at the house or on the phone – or so I thought. This made it all the more surprising to hear someone calling from the back door. ‘Hullo!’ I shouted. ‘Come in!’

In came this immensely tall man who had to duck his head right down to get through the door from the kitchen. Made me feel I was Moley from The Wind in the Willows. Then, when he stood up, his shoulders just fitted into the door frame and his entire head was above it. Furthermore, it was my own doctor who I had not seen for years.

‘Uh, uh, hello, Doctor,’ I stuttered. ‘What on Earth is going on? How... why…’

‘Come to check your blood pressure,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you get my message?* You were partially taken off the doxazosin as it was making your blood pressure too low.’

‘Yes, I had half a pill, and they said, “Don’t even take that.” So I’ve been chucking this tiny half pill into the sink every day.’

He bent over, opened his large bag with a bright orange lining, and took out his blood pressure gadget. When he had done it, putting his stuff away he turned and said, ‘All OK now. Back to normal.’

Phew! What a day. I wish I was back to normal.

PS What exactly is normal?

*Later, I did check the 1571 messages and found his message saying he would be coming, and another from a friend.