My boring heart condition

After a heart attack, Roger Lewis was in bed for two months. Jigsaw puzzles and Frankie Howerd films stopped him going mad with boredom

Having been told by the doctors, after a heart attack, that I must do nothing for at least two months, how am I, the penniless freelancer, with no sick pay or rainy-day savings, meant to manage?

Crime? Sex tourism? It’s such a worry, I’m likely to have another heart attack.

For a week after discharge from the hospital, I kept going on sheer adrenalin. By scrawling on the bedsheets, I was able to deliver articles about A A Milne, Noël Coward and what it was like going up in an air-ambulance helicopter (pictured) – the frightful vibration wrecked my coccyx, if you must know.

Then I flopped, sagged, drooped. I simply haven’t had the puff to rustle up any extra business, and the nation’s literary and features editors have already clean forgotten my existence.

Maybe they assumed I’d croaked, which is why the Daily Mail sent two bunches of flowers. Kindly meant, no doubt. The net effect, anyway, is that gross income for February onwards is nil.

At liberty, as out-of-work music-hall artistes used to say, I’ve done a lot of reading – but all my life I’ve done a lot of reading. I am currently on the final few hundred pages of The Sea, The Sea.

What did anyone sane ever see in Dame Iris Murdoch? Frightful drivel: one improbable scene after another; the dialogue atrocious.

Anita Brookner is much better, at least as a prose stylist, except her novels are identical – impossible to tell one book from another: well-off single women in South Kensington mansion flats thinking they ought to fall in love and regretting it when they have done so.

I got a bit stuck on Richardson’s Clarissa, the punishingly long 18thcentury epistolary novel. Alexander Pope’s Homer translations I have loved.

I re-read a few Shakespeare plays: As You Like It (in an edition containing mad designs by Salvador Dali) and All’s Well That Ends Well. Though, here and there (obviously), the speeches are marvellous, the comic scenes are dreadful and the construction is hopeless, as if the bard couldn’t be bothered. I’d truly like to cut Touchstone’s balls off.

But I did have wet eyes at this from Two Gentlemen of Verona: ‘O, how this Spring of love resembleth/ The uncertain glory of an April day,/ Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,/ And by and by a cloud takes all away.’

Not bad, eh? The whole of romantic poetry, several hundred years in the future, is encapsulated there.

Otherwise, I watch old films on Talking Pictures. Frankie Howerd really does say, ‘Slap my nelly!’ in Further Up the Creek, where he replaced Peter Sellers (anxious to be an international star and get away from little British entertainments) from Up the Creek. I have a growing admiration for Kenneth More, who had bounce and charm and was never infuriating. More was English in the way Richard Burton was Welsh.

I worry about my alleged ‘demographic’. I can and do watch Joan Hickson as Miss Marple over and over, but the adverts interrupting the narrative every five minutes are all about vaginal dryness creams, leaving the RNLI money in one’s will, the Co-op’s prepaid funeral plans, and river cruises for those jammy sods (doctors, for instance, and teachers) on gold-plated, index-linked publicsector pensions.

You’d think I’d like music, but I can’t make sense of it. It is too abstract for me. I bought a box set of Puccini operas. Noise.

Nor can I listen to people talking on the radio. I need things to look at. Hence my new enthusiasm – jigsaw puzzles. When I was busy and active, an outin-front journalist and parent of newborn babies, I couldn’t detect any merit in jigsaws.

Now they have a soothing quality, and, as the Drabble woman says in her book about them, they are a brilliant antidote to paranoia and depression.

Well, theoretically they are these things. I haven’t finished any, except the 50-piece ones where it says Age 3+ on the box. I have an Edward Gorey design, with his detailed cross-hatching for the expanse of Dracula’s castle. I’ll need to live to be 1,000 to place the final segments.

Being poorly is a full-time job, or becomes one. I am on a ton of pills, neatly arranged in one of those coloured plastic trays old people have to hand. I inject insulin four times daily.

You know how, in a police-procedural drama, there is always a shot of a dead prostitute, her arms full of needle jabs, sprawled in a heroin den in somewhere like Leeds? That’s what I look like, my belly a picturesque array of pinholes and bruises.

I take a taxi to the hospital, where they run a stethoscope over me and I tell lies about how much red wine I drink. It all goes in the dossier.

Perhaps because I found climbing on to the examination couch a struggle –indeed needed assistance – the nurse wants me to join her cardiac rehabilitation sessions at a gym.

‘Each session begins with a group gradual warm-up, followed by a structured exercise circuit, and finishes with a group cool-down,’ it says breezily on my appointments letter. Patients are advised to ‘bring a small towel and bottle of water’.

I don’t think so, do you?