Sick Room Boredom: Where're me Comics, then?

I'm facing into my third week of being a temporary invalid due to my wee troubles, and the boredom factor is affecting me. Well, boredom isn't quite the thing -- there's plenty of Internet to look at and television and cat antics -- it's more frustration, I suppose, at having no stamina to get anything done.

There's a back garden could do with some attention, but I'm tired out on about the fifth or sixth clip of the secateurs. As for wheeling in sand to do a bit more of the patio, forget it. I couldn't lift the shovel if I tried. We have a mosaic or three to put together for the garden walls, but I'm short on materials (most especially mosaic mesh) and in no position to go hunt some down.

So, it's mostly sitting at the window looking at the world go by. I'm lucky in that there is a large green with another part of the housing estate beyond that, then the sudden uplift of green hills (we call them mountains, but my American friends think that's hugely funny) before a huge and interesting sky.

When I was a kid, the Kearns boys would drag a trolley of vegetables up from their mother's roadside shop at the bottom of Edmondstown, delivering cabbage or turnip, potatoes and pot herbs for my mother's kitchen. The trolley would be an old crate married to some pram wheels. In the bottom would be a big pile of second hand comics (there were several boys and girls in their family) and I'd swap whatever I had to hand, a number of Warlords, the Dandy, or Beano, for ones I didn't usually get otherwise. I usually got the better deal, at least in my mind, because the sheer quantity they'd hand over would keep me amused for weeks. Mrs Kearns got rid of a heap of waste paper and the boys got some free issues they'd not seen. They were a Godsend when I was laid up with some childhood ailment...

Anyhow, while musing on comics, the doctor interrupted by phoning me and upsetting me over the lack of Potassium in my latest blood sample. It was as low as "one point something" while I was in hospital. They gave me five days worth of pills to boost it and instructions to eat bananas and potato chips like there's no tomorrow (and there might indeed be no tomorrow if the levels don't rise, as it aids in muscle ativity, not least of which includes the ticker). My GP added orange juice to the equation, saying in his phone call that the result was now at the "two point someting" mark. It should be between "three point something and five" to be in the safe range, as far as I understand things.

I'm ascribing the loss to my blood pressure medicine. I'm beginning to swing from light fittings from the amount of bananas I'm taking. I'm eating chicken, beef, salmon, downing packets of crisps, gulping orange juice, the while increasing my body weight, which leads to higher blood pressure, which the blood pressure medication counteracts, which depletes my potassium... I wonder am I in trouble here, or will it swing around to e better level?

Next blood samples in nine or ten days.

Saturday morning: Tea Cards and Comics

Saturday mornings in my childhood I would awaken to an empty house. My father would be off working somewhere, my siblings somewhere unknown, and my mother at the fancy new supermarket on Taylor's Lane, Ballyboden. It would be a quick change into outdoor clothes and wellington boots and then into the kitchen where one of Mam's notes would be waiting with some coins wrapped up in a bank note.

"Pay the coal man" would be scribbled there. I'd groan, because paying the coal man involved a long wait by the road for the open-backed coal truck to wend its way up to the bottom gate. I'd scuffle off down the lane with my hands in my pockets, toss pebbles into the river and hang around on the low wall until he came. He wore a big money bag on a long leather shoulder strap like a bus conductor. He'd grin and take the money and mark off the account in a grubby notebook, signing off on my freedom for the rest of the day.

Saturdays were late-rising affairs for many of my pals, though one might appear through a gap, or at a bend in the road, or poking over the boundary of the pitch and putt course, watching out for my uncle who hated them short-cutting across his manicured putting greens. We might kick a football for a bit in a field, or talk about a football match on the television, or make plans for the afternoon. Everyone was up before their breakfast, as we said. Food on Saturday, at the beginning of a new pay week for our parents, didn't come until the groveries had been bought and that meant a trip to Ballyboden or to the modern Rathfarnham Shopping Centre with its several shops, this latter location limited to those whose parents had the use of a car or the time to make a two-bus journey.

My mother would appear off the 47 bus and haul the shopping bags to the farmhouse door, dropping them onto the floor and puffing on a Players No. 6 cigarette.

"I'm home," she'd say, pulling off her coat and hanging it in the hall. A headscarf would be untied from under her chin and dropped in a drawer. She'd start to pat her auburn coloured hair, feeling for any hairpins which might have come unlodged. She'd smooth out her skirt with both palms then join me at the table.

I would be agog, poking through the packages. She'd slap my hand away gently from the fresh fruit, scolding me mildly for mauling the new Vienna rolls without having first washed my grubby paws in the basin in the back kitchen. She'd ask me about the coal man. If he'd said anything? Had he given a receipt? Meanwhile, she was unpacking a straw-coloured palm-leaf woven shopping basket of white plastic butchers bags tied with red tapes and putting the meat away for the week.

As the kettle was filled from a jug dipped in a galvanised bucket of drinking water, the two objects of my searching would appear from a bag. A pound and a half of PG Tips tea and a comic from the newsagents beside what had been called Perry's shop. The tea was poured solemnly into the tin tea caddy one packet at a time, the rich smell of the dried leaf filling our nostrils. Then the paper envelope inside the cardboard box would be pulled out and I would see if I had a new collectors card for my album or just a repeat from a previous packet.

"Inventors and Inventions" was the promotion that was on at the time. We had sent a postal order to England in the princely sum of 10p for the album into which the cards were weekly gummed. And I almost had them all.

The other item of interest to my eight-year old self was the weekly comic, Warlord. This relatively new publication was a collection of impossibly heroic tales of the mighty Brits against the dastardy Hun in comic strip form. Lots of "Achtungs!" "Arrghs! and "Ka-pows" were sprinkled liberally throughout. Sometimes the Brits fough the Japs, and some "Eeee-i-eees" were thrown in for luck.

I'd spread the crude paper out on the kitchen table and pore over the contents, usually heading straight to my favourite first: Union Jack Jackson, an English soldier who had somehow been separated from his unit but had ended up joining an American outfit where he painted a Union Jack on his USA style helmet.

In the background, the kettle boiled and the frying pan heated up and my mother bustled about, cutting slices of bread and humming quietly to herself.