Beware! The seats on Clacton Pier are dangerous.

Every other week I take my mum to lunch on Clacton Pier.

When you are regularly doing something that’s horrible and boring you invent euphemisms. We joke that Mum gets cocktails with her lunch, although the truth is that those cocktails make everything taste like cardboard so that she really doesn’t want her M&S Prawn sandwich. The man in the chair opposite answers his phone throughout the day saying loudly, “Yeah, yeah, I’m on Clacton Pier.”

If you’ve never been on a Chemo ward then you will have imagined all sorts of things. I thought there would be sick looking people hooked up to machines, vomiting all over the place. On Clacton Pier, however, hardly anyone looks very sick. They sit in blue chairs that have super-charged reclining facilities and knit (properly, unlike me, who apparently is doing it wrong), read, snooze, eat, do puzzles and barely talk to their companions, who get to sit in a comfortable but upright blue chair. There are two jetties with chairs along each side. Each set of chairs has a drip stand beside it; a chrome giraffe that hovers next to the patient and beeps an ascending triplet when the bag in its mouth should be empty. Most patients have a permanent line through which the drugs are administered but others sit with their hands in a bucket of hot water that is wheeled to them on a specially designed trolley. These are a trip hazard for patients’ glamorous assistants, when they navigate a path through buckets and the nurses’ trollies, to fetch hot drinks when the chemo makes their friend or relative’s throat close up. Some patients are only there for an hour but most for at least half a day or longer and often take some gloop home with them in a blue bag, especially designed by Gucci (I’m not sure I believe the nurse that told us that). The really toxic drugs are hung with a black bag of death around them to stop the sun cheering them up. People laugh and chat.

It is a place that is bursting with hope but I must warn you about the chairs.

Each  patient’s chair has a remote control that hangs from a strap to the side of the right hand arm rest. This is a very special zapper with four buttons: an up and down each for the feet and head. Each patient has their own preferred way of spending the time. Some change positions frequently depending upon the activity, others sit, stiff and bolt upright, as if relaxing isn’t in their DNA while others lounge like they are at home in their pants watching telly. It seems simple enough, doesn’t it?

Except that sometimes they have a life of their own.

Mum was pushing the button. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to go up or down.
“It’s not working!” she panicked.
The chair back was scraping down the wall. Blocked on its travels by solid concrete. Suddenly the force of the chair remote was too strong and with a crash the chair pushed away from the wall slightly and placed itself in a laying position. Mum continued to press the button. The chair putting her further into a supine position, continuing so that her head was pointing towards the floor.
“Help! I don’t know what it’s doing?” she said, fingers locked on the remote.
I noticed that the giraffe’s foot was under the chair.
“Hold on!” I shouted, hoping that she would stop pushing the button, while I pulled it free.
The chair, confused by the signals it was getting leaped into the middle of the room and unplugged itself, leaving her trapped in that undignified position.
“The button’s not working,” Mum laughed.
I plugged the chair back in.
“It’s still not working!” She was confused, scared and hysterically laughing all at the same time. My voice only let me do an impression of Muttley but tears were streaming down my face.
“You need to press the other button. You want to go up not down.” I mouthed and she righted herself.
A nurse walked past, looking concerned.
“Are you alright?”
Mum and I looked at each other, wondering how she hadn’t noticed that the chair was in the middle of the room
“We do have a laugh, don’t we?” Mum said.

That’s what life is about, isn’t it?