The Daily Novel

My lungs are one hundred years old. That is the verdict of science. Delivered by Norah from Connemara, who also told me that it has been raining there non-stop for twelve weeks. So that is why Camden Town is full of the Irish.

Norah, the spirometry person at the surgery, has just been causing me to puff and blow into a tube connected to a variety of electronic machines. The result is a 2 per cent deterioration compared with the last time I was tested in March. The recommendation is that I give up smoking. And that meanwhile I use an inhaler to aerate my aged lungs. To be precise two inhalers, which will work on different parts of my smoke-filled airways. So now I have to take eight puffs a day. So if only I can get myself addicted to the inhaler I shall not have enough puff left to smoke my customary twenty fags.

But for some reason it made me feel happy. I felt incredibly lucky that my lungs have lasted the equivalent of one hundred years. Perhaps the Queen will send me a telegram addressed to ‘the lungs of Bob Jones’ as soon as she reads this blog.

When I got home I found God waiting for me on the doorstep. Two young me who were concerned about the state of my soul. The first addressed me in what I thought was an American accent. So I thought that it was the Seventh Day Adventists. Quite wrong. The accent, he told me, was Australian and they came from the Jehovah’s Witness regiment of God’s army.

It’s sounds American to me, I told him. ‘You reckon’, he replied. That clinches it, I told him. None of the Australian friends of my youth would have said, ‘You reckon’. You not only drive American cars, you have adopted their accent.

His friend piped up. ‘I’m English. I blame it on the Second World War and the American troops who invaded us.’ I agreed and told him how they had corrupted me with their chewing gum. ‘And as for my sister…’ He interrupted me and said: ‘I know what you mean. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

I went inside rather pleased that for the first time ever I had managed to get the men of God off my doorstep with them delivering their religious message. And that I had managed to deliver a political message to them.

Then, I sobered up, and thought that if the Big Brother cameras had been filming this little encounter, all these of us would have been up before the beaks of popular opinion for inciting racial hatred of Americans.

But at least they could not accuse us of bullying. Because the Americans are bigger than us. And they not only have weapons of mass destruction. They use them. And in doing so they make their use more acceptable. And they incite their political enemies to hit back at them, and their allies, with bombs rather than arguments.

Must stop now. Just realised that I have smoked three or four fags while writing this. And I have not yet got my inhalers out of the box.