One-upmanship

I used this term in my last blogpost. One-upmanship. It was coined in 1952. I think it is a useful term but I dislike the concept it unveils.

I don't know if this has ever been true for you but in many social situations I have encountered people whose raison d'etre seems to be to score points and win one over on others. Like this:-

Where did you go on holiday this year?

Oh, We drove down to Cornwall and stayed in a cottage just outside St Austell. It was lovely.

Well we went to California. We picked up a hire car in LA. and drove up to San Francisco via Big Sur and Salinas. It was stunning. You wouldn't believe it! By the way, how's your son getting on?

He's fine thank you. He completed his degree and he's thinking of doing a masters at Sheffield.

Oh my son has already got his masters and he's applied for a PhD at Oxford. He should get a full scholarship. And he's met a gorgeous Italian girl related to Silvio Berlusconi. Her family has an amazing villa in Tuscany and we have been invited over for the summer. Has your son got a girlfriend?

Err no. He's gay.

Well I'm sorry to hear that. My son is like a stallion by all accounts. A real chip off the old block if you know what I mean! Ha-ha-ha!

This famous British comedy sketch was first performed in 1966:-

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Babies In The Dark

 

Bootham Park Psychiatric Hospital York

Christmas  Night 1986

It was very cold and snowy and I remember.

I wasn’t very happy.

I had just started work in the November.

A new staff nurse role, in a new city of York

I’d barely been there a month and still lived at the nurses’ home at Clifton Hospital a couple of miles out of the city.

I knew no one properly and I was homesick

And already I had been put onto night duty.

The ward was quiet. 

A psychiatric admission ward with ten general admission patients and an attached mother and baby unit with a half complement of two mums and two newborns.

We had three staff of duty. Staff nurses clive and I covered the main ward and Sue who was a motherly enrolled nurse took charge of the nursery.

Around midnight Sue and I were in the darkened office, each of us feeding a baby.

I couldn’t see her face properly just a glint of her glasses from the lights from the snowy garden.

She was asking me about me, and I had been yacking on in the dark for an age.

I had no idea what I was doing but my baby was large and content and sleepy so from the get go..so I was lucky.

“ Are you gay John? “  she seemed to ask me out of nowhere and she nodded when I defensively replied no, just a little too quickly .

“it’s ok if you were you know? ” She said slowly in her broad flat Yorkshire accent  “I’ve always loved gay men”

And in the comfortable silence that followed, something quietly and inexplicably shifted in me 

As we fed babies in the dark on Christmas Day

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Crem Etiquette

 Crematorium etiquette. 

Try to sit on the right at the back .

Out of the way. 

In the cheap seats.

I liked the St Asaph Crem

The hymn’s lyrics came upon tv screens and they project a huge photo of the deceased on the wall as you go in. 

The vicar was a bearded hearty soul that looked like the Titanic’s captain.

He was a bit of a show girl I thought.

I wasn’t sure about the Christmas Tree in the grounds, it was lit with fairy lights

There were a couple of villagers at the funeral so we teamed up . 

I enjoyed the hymns and belted out “The day thou gavest “ so I could be heard at the front.

I hate lacklustre singing at funerals.

There’s nothing worse.

My choir will be singing at my funeral , I’ve decided I want Olè Laya Loila instead of the first hymn

A Winter funeral

There is nothing sadder

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