Every now and then, when I’m out on the road, I like to amuse myself by being courteous to other motorists. It makes them smile, makes me smile and usually makes the person behind me grind their teeth. That’s the bit that amuses me.
It also helps to unblock the traffic, both on the road and in my mind. Step off the throttle, slow down, let someone in, ease the flow. Man, it feels good!
You may have guessed that I’m writing this while waiting for a parcel to be delivered. It could come any time in the next four hours and I have resigned myself to waiting. It’s an honourable resignation and I feel at peace. I’m imagining the driver out there somewhere like Postman Pat, pootling uphill and down dale (not that we’ve got any dales round here, so if he’s driving down one where the hell does he think he’s going?), waving to greet everybody who smiles his way. I didn’t watch a lot of Postman Pat but I don’t remember any characters ever losing their rag because the bastard was an hour late with their parcel. So I’m taking a leaf out of their book and I can feel the patience coursing through my bloodstream like morphine.
We used to do this sort of thing all the time before we became permanently connected and trackable by satellite. We’d wait on street corners for friends to turn up. We’d sit and read whole stories in newspapers. We’d wait half an hour or more for our dinner to cook. There was no such thing as instant gratification.
But there was, at least, gratification.
Back in the days when we used phone boxes, it always interested me that the French ones displayed the message ‘Patientez svp’ while you were waiting to connect. Their way of saying “Please wait” implied not just waiting but patiently waiting. It seemed a very reasonable request and it always induced a mellow sense of patience in me, even after 20 minutes and 15 francs had slipped out of my life.
Speaking of which, have you noticed the latest euphemism doing the rounds on the news? You’ll hear it in any of those items about hospitals or care homes running mass euthanasia policies to clear their beds of aged patients. Rather than saying the patients “were killed” or “were murdered”, for some reason the stock expression has become “the patients had their lives shortened”.
Really? Shortened? Can it be possible? So not only were they killed but, having gone in with an ingrowing toenail at the age of 80, they were carried out in a box at the age of 72? It seems doubly cruel.
You’ll have noticed the similarity between the word ‘patients’ and the word ‘patience’. They sound identical, don’t they? It’s no coincidence. You might assume that hospital patients are so called because the one thing you have to be when attending hospital is patient. This is also true of doctors and nurses, of course, but if they were all called patients it would get even more confusing than it is already.
Now that the NHS is getting a bit more cash to spend, my advice would be to begin by buying a job lot of cricket videos to show in hospital waiting rooms, because both require the same patient mindset and it’s a mindset that very few people come into hospital with. It usually has to be induced with opioids or a ham sandwich from the hospital canteen. Cricket is both safer and cheaper. It also speeds up recovery times.
The connection between ‘patients’ and ‘patience’ is actually nothing to do with your capacity to lie for 77 hours on a hospital trolley without getting up and lobbing the rack of 12-year-old magazines through the blank information screen. Patience originally meant “suffering” and a patient was “one who suffers”.
So there I was thinking the French telecoms service had pulled a masterstroke by asking me politely to be patient when, in fact, the message on the screen was, “Suffer!” If only all customer service was that honest.
Incidentally, the name Patience was first used for the solo card game in the early 19th century. Before that it was universally referred to as Solitaire, which is French for “You’re on your own, mate”.
Still no parcel, by the way. Turns out Postman Pat went to Maidstone by mistake. Grrrrr… I could shorten his life.
