The particular regiment in which I spent nine years was famous for a number of things, one of which its comically successful and ambitious officers.
Having had only 50% of these qualities myself, I spent most of my career trying to look harder than I was, substituting ascent for enjoyment, and making lifelong friendships. Very occasionally, an utter git would be posted to the battalion, and they would stand out like a sore thumb. One of these challenged me at lunch one day for being a ‘cultural fraud’, on the basis that I had dared to mention an opera that I had seen recently. Art, in his tawdry world, and soldiering, simply didn’t mix.
That I probably was being a bit of a fraud has nothing to do with it. I was also drawing a witty comparison between the Prisoners’ Chorus from Fidelio and something the battalion had recently been up to and, besides, I actually rather liked it. This officer, on the basis of being senior to me, was sadly untouchable until much, much later.
I found myself drawing the same comparison today, for I can think of no better metaphor for our final release, whenever it is, from the various lockdowns that we are continuing to undergo, than the blinking into the sunshine of the Fidelio chorus line when they are released from their political prison. Try it for yourself.
In anticipation of that day, I have decided that the only two useful things for the remainder of the pandemic I can do is a) try to arrive there alive myself, and b) to try, by my behaviour, to help others do the same. To that end, and after the persuasion of a friend, I bought a thing called an oximeter the other day.
I’m not entirely sure what it does, to be honest, although any life-saving gadget that only costs £20 gets my vote. Basically, you shove it on your middle finger and, after a short pause, it tells you how saturated your blood is with oxygen, and what your pulse rate is. Having been brought up to believe that saturation is generally bad, I was initially thrilled to learn that, in the case of fingers, it is good. Indeed, I began to see something that I could be genuinely good at without hard work which, ironically, is roughly how I had hoped that my military career would have gone all those years ago.
It’s a hard task-master, that oximeter. Basically, on a scale of 1-100, somewhere 95-100 is good and anything else is, roughly speaking, dead. Any reading between 0 and 90 is, frankly, pointless. I think the idea is that your body begins to feel crap before you do, and you can have a few hours warning to alert the emergency services.
The first time I tried it, I got a 99% saturation and a pulse of 70 bpm, and I’m not ashamed to tell you, I was quite proud of this. I might even have welled up a little. Ten minutes later, and in search of the elusive 100%, I gave it another go, and the little bastard had gone down to 98%. ‘No matter,’ I thought. ‘I must have just done something slightly un-saturating, like had a glass of wine’ I gave it another ten minutes, and it had gone down to 97%, and the pulse up to 77 bpm. On the basis that 94 is ‘call the doctor’ and 92 is ‘call 999. I think you will agree that I was admirably calm.
My family filed in to the kitchen for dinner and they all gave it a go, with scores that ranged from 98-100. Pretending that I hadn’t tried it yet, I put it on my finger, and was down to 96, with a pulse rate in the 80s. No one said a word, but it was clear that my body was starting to close down.
Secretly, I went to the loo and ran it first on all 8 fingers and both thumbs (94-99), and then on a couple of toes. Back in the kitchen, I tried it on a banana (10/0), a cinnamon stick (0/0) and the top of an empty wine bottle. Meanwhile, the others all registered high scores of 99 and 100.
Composure returned, I took it to the privacy of my office to try again quietly. ‘85’, it said, and made an unpleasant bleeping noise. ’85 warrants a trip to the hospital’, said the book of words. ‘Don’t bother,’ said another, ‘as you’re fading too fast anyway.’
That was three days ago. Unbelievably, I live on.
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