I went to Aldeburgh this morning to see a cousin. Strictly speaking, he is my father's cousin. He's a couple of years older than my father, and lived abroad when I was a child, so he wasn't around while I was growing up, but we have seen a bit of each other since discovering we had both settled in these parts.
I started trying to arrange to visit at the start of last month, sending an email apologising that it had been a long time and asking if I could nip up before Christmas, but got no reply. I put this down to probable computer troubles rather than petulance or catastrophe, since he is a nice person who doesn't easily take offence, and if he had been seriously ill one of his friends would have told me. Wouldn't they? When I drew a blank on a couple of phone calls I began to wonder what I was supposed to do. My cousin, after all, was a grown up who had been managing his own life since before I was born, and had a close network of friends that he saw far more regularly than he saw me. On the other hand he was eighty-seven years old and lived alone since his wife died a couple of years ago. I realised that although I've met some of his friends I did not know their surnames or telephone numbers.
My third phone call, a day or two before Christmas Eve, was answered by a live voice and not an answering machine. My cousin, it turned out, had been in hospital having his other hip done. I felt rather bad I had not known he was having a second hip replacement. On the other hand, he hadn't told me. Since I've known him he's never been one to make much of medical matters. At the large lunch he hosted for his eightieth birthday he kept quiet about the fact that he was about to go into hospital for major heart surgery.
His nephew was about to arrive to stay with him when I rang, so I wished him a happy Christmas and speedy recuperation and promised to call him again in the New Year. When I did he told me he was moving to Blackpool to be near his nephews. That makes sense, since he has no children of his own. He was hoping to move quite soon. I arranged to visit last week, with the Systems Administrator, so that we could see him before he went, but we ended up cancelling because infecting an eighty-seven year old with a cold who had just come out of hospital and was about to move house seemed a bad idea, and neither of us was fit to drive that far anyway.
In the event I just squeezed in under the wire, since he was able to reschedule for today and he leaves this Friday. I ended up going by myself, since the SA's cold relapsed yesterday afternoon to a state you definitely wouldn't inflict on anybody. It was rather poignant, seeing my cousin sitting surrounded by boxes and bound for a place where he will know nobody, apart from his nephews. Still, he is a very sociable man, who already had lifetime membership of the U3A gifted to him by the Ipswich branch for helping set it up, and has just been enrolled in the north west and Liverpool geological societies by the members of the geology group he ran, so he won't be shy about meeting new people. I felt sad as I bade him goodbye, though, not liking to kiss him because of my cold. It's a long way to Blackpool, and what are the chances of my getting myself there in reality when last year I didn't even make it as far as Aldeburgh?
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