Maureen Lipman
I slept only between the hours of 5 and 6 a.m, thanks to self-induced terror tactics. My son Adam stayed over, having offered to accompany me for my angiogram – or ‘the procedure’. He kindly moved my old Honda Jazz round the corner and parked his car in my space overnight. The procedure revealed that a) I am impossible to sedate – I once told a full joke under anaesthetic; b) I am neurotic; and c) I didn’t, after all, need a stent. So why was I so breathless? Could it be because, at three score and ten... er... plus eight, I find myself in love? Prescription: I must walk more, breathe more, change medication and cool it.
Adam came back to check on me and rebuked me for moving my car – which I hadn’t, because the doctor said that I shouldn’t drive for a day or two. The car had, of course, been hot- rodded and nicked. I phoned 101 and frankly the call was more harrowing than the angiogram. One hour on hold and I needed more sedation. The algorithm gave me a crime number and I gave the algorithm short shrift.
I went to the Mayfair launch of a book about cooking and the crown by Tom Parker Bowles. It was hot and I was overdressed. (Isn’t everyone wearing layers now? Yes, Maureen, but not a whole knitted sheep.) The Queen gazed fondly at her son’s delightfully ditsy speech with exactly the same ‘Aww, bless’ look on her face I sported when I realised my son might have left my stolen car’s window open. Later that night my partner David and I decided to tell our children that, with a combined age of 156, we are going to get married. In truth I had been rather against the ‘M’ word, but on a train coming back from Edinburgh he mentioned that it was the minor festival of Tu B’Av – a day when a Jewish woman can ask a man to marry her. Unable to resist the gag, I slid under the table separating us on to one knee and asked him for his hand. To my surprise and slight panic, he gave it.
My late, great husband Jack Rosenthal’s birthday would have been on 8 September. So, armed with a birthday cake, we set off in David’s car to tell first my kids, then his about our engagement. Suddenly my phone rang.‘Hello, this is the Metropolitan Police here. We just found your car today in Chippenham Road.’ (Five minutes from my flat.) ‘Oh gosh, thank you. Is she OK? Was she... peed in? No, I mean, don’t worry I’ll be there in a minute.’ We reversed and headed off at 20 miles an hour, as you do these days in ‘no Khan-do’ London, and found two officers, one warm and twinkly, and one tall, dark and gorgeous, picking three or four damp and blurry parking tickets off the windscreen of my abused car, which was in an induced coma and required a procedure. David went home for jump leads.
Even though the car had been flashing hazard lights for three days, people came out of houses and offered us tea. It felt like the 1950s. We’d never had it so good. The road where we waited was narrow, so we decided, on David’s return, that rather than re-align all our cars, he would plug the leads straight from their police van to my engine. However, this caused the first crusty behaviour of the day from other drivers. ‘Oh, right, so that’s what the Met are offering these days is it? Servicing celebrities?’ ‘Not botherin’ catchin’ any villains today then? All right for some!’ ‘You’re blocking the effing road, you arseholes!’ The cops were impeccable – patient, smiling and interesting. And, improbably, one of the officers, whose surname was Hussein, turned out to have a Jewish mother. They’re both coming to the wedding.
As David turned the car round again, we saw a double rainbow. We drove to the four separate houses of his three grown-up children and his youngest brother to drop the bombshell. All reactions were warm, and all were individual. One child said that he needed time ‘to process it’. We broke the news to another as he slid leaves into a new dining table, transforming the scene into a Jack Rosenthal play – one with, I like to think, a happy ending. Driving home at 10.30 p.m., we realised that we were starving. Restaurants and pubs were tipping out. There was a dip in temperature, so we pulled up at the crêperie stall in Hampstead high street and bought two rubbery cheese and mushroom crêpes, which we ate too quickly in the car, with the bum-warmer heating switched on. That night, with the help of Gaviscon, I slept like a teenager.
the spectator | 21 september 2024 | www.spectator.co.uk
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