Dear FOG ( Friends of Gloria ),

Guess what! My surprise Christmas present from Big Ron was a beautiful blue ball gown!

He said he didn’t need it any longer (!), and providentially this came just at the time when I was wondering what I could wear in church on Christmas morning.

Perhaps it was excitement, perhaps carelessness in getting dressed, but just when we didn’t want problems my left elbow came apart!

That’s just where my arm was broken when the hospital threw me out. Some five times it has been glued together again since then, the last time with a couple of pins for added strength, but now even one of these pins has sheared on the very doorstep of Christmas Eve.

What was it that the poet Burns said about the best laid plans of mice and men and mannequins?

So I arrived at church in my beautiful ball gown wearing a sling!

One very kindly gentleman visitor, seeing me sitting lonely at the back on my own had a mind to come and sit alongside for company until persuaded otherwise by his daughter, not to mention assorted grandchildren, also his wife. And me a blonde that day.

Rev David holds an annual ‘competition’ for pictures taken of members holding a church magazine in whatever locations they have visited during the year, the more widely varied the better. The results are shown on Christmas morning, when he hands out awards; nativity scene discs of olive wood that have come all the way from Bethlehem itself!

So I arrived at church in my beautiful ball gown wearing a sling!

Some folk would hang these on their Christmas tree, but to me they are extra, extra special – the equivalent of earning an Olympic Gold Medal, because they are the only thing that I possess in the world which I have earned by my own efforts.

As I tell myself, everybody needs to feel that they are good at something.

Now that the immediate excitement of going to church is over until whenever one might (or might not) be invited to be involved again, we can tell Ron about our trouble and depend on his specialist surgical interest in the problematic case of Gloria’s Left Elbow.

At least I have the rare ability to be in two places at once.

Not everybody can sit at home with their arm at the hospital.

One can appreciate temporarily how poor Venus de Milo is feeling, although they have been a lot more careless in her case. Both arms gone missing altogether, and not even the loan of a vest!

Surgeons can do metal hip replacements, but they will all tell you that elbow replacements are much more difficult.

Unperturbed by the responsibility...
Ron promptly selected a suitable thickness of metal....

and was soon drilling and grinding...

and welding and filing...

until, hey presto,....
an unbreakable replacement piece for the glue and plywood!

Now isn’t that marvellous?

With the attention of such a skilled surgeon, at last I can be confident that my left elbow will never snap again.

Of course instead it can unscrew!

Flushed with success, Ron carried on to improve my problematic knees, both of which already contain early metal implants done at different dates from the original plywood.

With appreciation to both Rev David and Big Ron, now I am ready to go about raising smiles once more.

And with whom better, sharing a Christmas cracker at Waltham Cross Pavilion, than the actual jovial Mayor of Broxbourne, Eddy Rowland with his delightful Mayoress wife, June?

Love to all my friends, from Gloria.