My Uncle Toby has always been a busy man so when he retired at the age of 70 it was no surprise that he decided to take up a new career. What was bit of surprise was his choice of career. He announced, in between the Brussels sprouts and gravy being passed to him across the Sunday table, that starting Monday he was going to be a medical distributor. Catching the Brussels sprouts in her lap my mother asked what on earth a medical distributor did anyway and Uncle Toby explained that basically he'd be going around all the old age home in the area to show them new wheelcahirs, walking frames, bedpans and all the kinds of medical equipment that they use in old age homes. We all nodded sagely and congratulated him on his new path in his life and wished him many wheelchairs sold.
Come Monday morning it was blisteringly cold and we all watched from the upstairs window as Uncle Toby, or what you could see of him under his winter coat, woolen hat, mittens and goggles (he hated the cold in his eyes did Uncle Toby), fighting with a wheelchair at the boot of his car. It must have taken him at least twenty minutes to get it folded up and into the car only for the boot to pope open again. Uncle Toby marched back into the house, with a blast of cold air behind him, slammed a door or two and muttered his way to the tool shed at the back of the house only to emerge a few minutes later with a piece of rope. He fashioned a loop of some kind that more or less kept the kept the boot closed and off he drove, Uncle Toby the medical distributor.
When he came home that night he was in fine spirits. We couldn't shut him up for a minute and it was only the lamb chops and Yorkshire pudding (they were Uncle Toby's absolute favourite) that gave us all a moment of peace. He told us some wild tales about the people in the old age home and the nurses and doctors. Said he was a lucky man indeed that his family hadn't up and dumped him in one of those places but that some of them weren’t too bad after all. He'd had a pretty good start as medical distributor as well, having sold two wheelchairs in one day. He reckoned it was the way he demonstrated them by whizzing up and down the corridors that did it, showed them off to their best advantage he said.
Uncle Toby went to bed before all of us that night, said he was exhausted from all the wheelchair antics and needed an early start in the morning. The next day he was off again, wheelchair safely in boot. It wasn't long before we heard the front door creak open though and two voices whispering in the passageway. As we poked our heads out to see what was going on we saw Uncle Toby and a little old lady with the whitest biggest hair we’ve ever seen standing a bit shyly in the doorway. Uncle Toby the medical distributor smiled at us and said "This is Flo, she didn’t want a wheelchair but she agreed to come for supper".
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