Meet David Rennie

6th of September 2020. JM

It’s Sunday afternoon and I am involved in “Operation Fatten up”. On the table is an apple pie – David Rennie’s favourite desert. An hour before we consumed a nice lunch cooked by yours truly.

Following a recent hospital stay during the Covid 19 lockdown, David was discharged with a lengthy list of health problems that needed looking into. Worryingly it ran to 8 pages with one of the comments being that David was extremely under weight.

So, a group of neighbours have been supplying David with cooked food as his body needs some extra reserves. And in between mouthfuls David told me…

"Well I went to hospital and they found all sorts of things that they didn’t know were wrong. Notably because of the spine."

"All the medicines that I take, for all the different things that I have, make you sleepy. Essentially, it’s morphine patches. That is a pretty big handicap. You can’t do ordinary things. And when it’s painful, of course it distracts you from thinking."

I asked David about the food situation.

"They are all very kind. It is staged managed by Gudrun down the road. She organised it so that various people come and bring me some supper. I do some cooking as well."

84-year-old David still lives independently. His wife passed away. He has a daughter, two grandchildren and a great-grandchild. I asked him about the Water Game film and some of the comments from those who have seen it.

"I liked it all really."

"Somebody had commented that it was educational and the bit where I describe about the beams, that is something from when I would teach at the school of architecture. I was very pleased to see that because I think it was extremely clear. But the main thing was the game itself, and the fact that people enjoy it."

David revealed that although he has limited movement at the moment, he would still like to run the Water Game in 2021 if he can.

"I have been thinking about it in small ways but not seriously really because it is so evidently over the horizon at present. I occasionally store something away thinking that will be suitable for some purpose."

"I am soldiering on, don’t we all?"

And throughout our lunch and desert we are still practising our French.

"Obviously we do the French grammar and all the rest."

"But we have also read several books in detail. For example, the French book - Le Petit Prince, which is my favourite book."

"Voltaire’s Candide- we did quite a lot of interesting grammar in that. It is pretty grim because he describes awful things. So, we do it in dribs and drabs."

"“But we also did Alphonse Daudet, a French short storyteller from maybe two hundred years ago. Lettres de mon moulin has some excellently crafted stories. We are just reading one about the Pope’s mule and how she gets her own back on a vicious papal assistant who steals the wine which the Pope has put aside for the mule. It’s very good.”"

To be continued