Tuesday 8th May 2012

Val, keen on a drop, hovering on the edge of the abyss, yet one of the greatest Poor Little Rich Gays who ever lived, didn’t spend a weekend in the country. He spent a weekend at the Charing. That’s a hospital in London’s West. Yesterday he emerged with a new hip, which is more than a weekend in the country achieves – very often.

He underwent hip-snap in September from a fall while more than adequately refreshed. It wouldn’t mend, so was renewed by replacement.

Heaving forth from the facility yesterday (nurses lined up, weeping, to bid farewell. Well, one. But Val had gilded their lives and shown them a life never before imagined), I said, ‘The Queen Mother, when 94, remained at the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers for ten days after her hip replacement so that, when she left, she could walk unaided.’ ‘ That was one of the changeovers,’ Val rumbled, inching forth on a walking frame, his first substantial distance since Friday’s knife-work. It is widely believed that Her Late Majesty was substituted several times in latter years so that she might live to a hundred.

In that hospital they were in fact busy working up another Queen Mother.

Motoring back to the Val apartment, we wondered about the Yummy Mummys of West London. ‘What do they do all day?’ I said. ‘Look for keys,’ said Val, undiminished by anesthesia and hospital life.

Now he is enthroned on a high chair with his own sharps disposal box. All Mr Dhutta’s patients self-inject for six weeks against blood clotting. It marks them out from the run-of-the-mill. We took a simple supper including a black-edged salami. In fact it was pepper but we agreed it was a mourning salami  most suitable for consumption during a period of mourning. What about other mourning food? So odd that it has never been introduced. Where is it? Black-edged or black through.

But we weren’t in mourning, not at all.