Our family friend has always been a larger than life figure. Witty, unsentimental – and not one to say no to another brandy. At family parties, he’s the one gossiping about the latest scandal to catch up with a local MP, or regaling us with tales of the outrageous philandering of various Sheffield Wednesday players over the past 40 years. He could make anything – a jacket potato, a broken relationship – funny, somehow.
We would often spend Christmas morning with him and his family, before going our separate ways. But, one Christmas, about 10 years ago, when he was supposed to be meeting family abroad, he fell down the stairs, whisky in one hand, suitcase in the other, and broke his ribs. The hospital had patched him up and told him not to fly. So, here he was back with us in Sheffield, making the best of it, but looking increasingly peaky.
The morning rolled on but the anecdotes weren’t flowing as they usually were. He was convinced he was OK but he didn’t look it. He tried to make it upstairs for a nap but couldn’t; he tried, gingerly, to eat Christmas lunch, and failed. So, before I’d so much as placed a party hat on my head, my mum and I decided to take him to A&E. We thought about calling an ambulance, but how long would that take on Christmas Day?
By the time we got there, he’d gone from peaky to barely responsive. Other outpatients helped us get him to a ward, where the generic smell of hospital food and wind filled the air. It reminded me of previous hospital visits, when my grandad was ill.
Different though, was the spirit. There were heroic attempts at festive gaiety everywhere you looked, despite the underlying sterile and miserable mood; tinsel hung from drip stands and bowls of Christmas pudding congealed on bedside tables. Cheerful nurses, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were bustling about and using that great term of endearment so peculiar to Sheffield: “duck”.
When visiting hours were over, we headed home to cold bread sauce and Christmas telly. We watched something daft on television, probably Agatha Christie, and played something even dafter, such as Sheffield’s take on Monopoly, Sheffield Shares. It was already late, and snowing, and I remember feeling deflated – had we missed Christmas?
Although our friend eventually recovered, he had actually punctured a lung and went on to get deep vein thrombosis. And, while that Christmas isn’t a personal favourite, it has gone down in family lore as “the Christmas I saved a life”. Whether that’s strictly true, or a little bit of dramatic licence, I couldn’t possibly comment, but its annual retelling certainly hasn’t hurt my ego. And, as our friend always says, “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.
