Absurdity and Existence

It's just after dawn and a nurse is sticking a needle in your arm, again. What do you do? Why, write a poem about it of course.

The Substacksphere is full of people discussing the heat, it’s the obvious subject. It’s hot like Provence outside. What an absurd time to write about Christmas. Only 212 days to go people. Not that this is about Christmas, it’s about my Dad, a keen absurdist.

Dad

Until I was well into adulthood, Dad always took his kids with him for the Christmas ward round at whichever hospitals had patients so sick they couldn’t go home. We went along behind him like ducklings to stand awkwardly and meet kids with tubes coming out of their noses and parents sat beside them with permanent concern written behind their smiles.

When Dad worked at the Leeds General Infirmary, it was important to dodge any interactions with king of the paedos/abusers/necrophiliacs/self aggrandising ultra-weirdoes, Jimmy Savile, though back then he was just known as a friend to the royal family and to senior politicians. Savile was frequently wandering around with his knob barely concealed under his porter’s outfit, and my angelic looking sisters unfortunately did have to suffer a couple of interactions with this career criminal, but they were thankfully non-tactile and all they had to burden them was the unwanted signed autographs he forced on them.

After the children’s wards we’d gaze into hermetically sealed plastic boxes containing newborn babies. The Neonates ICU felt significantly more sombre. There was no turkey for Mr Spicer to carve wheeled through its secure and airlocked entrance. We would have to wash our hands with Hibiscrub on entry and be extra well behaved because some these scraps were so tiny and vulnerable; no more than a handful.

The babies here were occasionally so premature they were born before 24 weeks, the legal abortion limit. What I remember about them is that their bodies not yet formed sufficiently to face the world are a funny colour, they still have that fur and waxiness to their skin that protects them in the womb, and keeps them warm until they get more babylike and chubbly. Their skin is so thin it seems in memory you could see through it, the blood, the veins, the tiny bones.

But many went on to survive, and thrive, and send my Dad Christmas cards into adulthood. And, despite being broadly an extremely liberal man, it explained why he is anti the upper limit of 24 weeks on abortion. It’s a difficult conversation to have and easy to fall into a feminist, liberal position, but perhaps harder if you’ve ever visited a neonatal ICU or operated on a 23 week old baby that went on to send you Christmas cards.

Most of these babies also had tiny tubes of oxygen coming out of their noses and tiny blue toenails due to, I assume, lack of sufficient oxygen going into their tiny lungs. They were dressed in specially knitted outfits made by caring Grannies who knitted tiny clothes for strangers’ premmie babies for whom there are no clothes small enough.

At work, Dad spoke in a distinct tone of voice that only appeared when he was talking to patients’ families. His hospital voice. It somehow managed to contain the direct and grave seriousness that it should but also a relaxing avuncular kindness.

Dad and I were talking about legacy the other day as he lay in hospital propped up by five pillows and more types of medication than I thought it was possible one person could take. He wanted me to make sure he was remembered as a kind surgeon and not the type that is arrogant and cold with his patients. Of everything I know about my Dad, this I’ve known forever.

Dad, and Wolfy

Growing up, I seethed with jealousy for all the children that loved him. One of his former patients even called him Daddy Dick, which so enraged me that eventually an age six me had to correct her, “He’s not your Daddy, he’s my Daddy!”

When Dad arrived at hospital in Bath a former patient of his, now a grown up, emerged from the NHS staff machinery and ensured his spaniel could come and visit. I have seen the email she wrote to the powers that be

“There is a patient on the ______ ward who is very dear to me – Richard Spicer. He was my paediatric surgeon in Bristol from when I was 12 until I was 19, after I transferred to his care from GOSH when we moved south.

Not only did he save my life more than once, but he was also — and still is — one of the kindest people I have ever known. He always went above and beyond for his patients and made incredibly difficult days, weeks, and months more bearable, not just as a clinician but as a human being. I am only one person across a long and remarkable career, so the number of lives he has touched is immeasurable. I honestly feel I owe him everything — the life I love, my beloved children and even the career path I chose.”

He was never just my Daddy. And anyway, by 1985, Dad had six kids with 16 years between the youngest and oldest (me). He had split from Mum a decade earlier. And while it’s not what you dream of, your parents splitting and a lot of years of venom between the two sides - it happens. Quite a lot.

I don’t think my Mum wanted the life he wanted, of ribaldry, and loud, fun, people and constantly moving should the NHS dictate it. He hates the class structure that at that time my Mum sat quite tightly confined in. The other day he was doing impressions of different types of sixties Sloane Rangers for my niece and me, they were very funny.

Dad’s got a lot of friends, accumulated over time, largely over drinks and/or operating tables. My stepmother has to titrate visiting hours quite ferociously or it’d be a non-stop party in there.

Anyway n all, what with it being 25°C outside and ice lolly weather, I want to talk about Christmas ward round memories. Sometimes we’d manage to inadvertently arrange ourselves beside him in order of size so we looked like a scruffy matryoshka doll all laid out at the end of some poor kiddy with cancer’s bed.

Mr Spicer, doing his festive ward round with his kids

In the early days of these visits, when it was just Tom and me, there’d always be sherry, even whiskey, in the ward’s staff room on Christmas Day and everyone, working or not, was tucking in. Tom and I who were - like most seventies kids - cruelly deprived of crisps, sweets and sugary things just stood quietly stuffing as much as possible until we could go home and open our presents. By the late 00s when he retired that culture was long gone.

In olden times too, you’d often make shifty eye contact with other doctors’ awkward looking kids that you passed on the ward round but that tradition also became less common.

Some of my closest and oldest friends’ are the kids of surgeons. I wouldn’t find this out until sometimes years into our friendship usually so there’s obviously something in how you’re shaped by having a parent who will never think you are ill and will frequently not be there when other Dads are because other people were a matter of life and death, literally, and you were fit and well. I had half a day off sick my entire school career, and even then when the school rang home to say I needed to be n bed I was told to get myself back on the bus. Two car families weren’t the norm in 1980.

I didn’t live with my Dad in my teens, he lived abroad for much of it with my stepmother and their kids, my half-siblings, the three youngest in the end of the bed festive line up. I’ve missed some of his life and he has missed some of mine and that’s just divorce. Regardless, my Daddy is of primary importance to me and who I am. It’s suffocating to consider how much I love him as I write this sentence. There are conversations that I can only have with my father and quite often they are about the ridiculous.

Just over three weeks ago Dad was dealt a vicious blow by a disease I don’t feel inclined to name but is not hard to guess. Until then, he was still walking his dog albeit avoiding hills and moving far slower than the old normal pace. He was still going to the pub to see his friends, albeit with less ale. Today, he is paralysed from the middle of his thoracic spine. How he has navigated this hideous turn of events has been astonishingly courageous. By pointing out the absurdity of his circumstance and making it seem ridiculous rather than tragic has helped make these new indignities less awful for his family to see, and, he said to me that it was important to be able to laugh at such things in order to bear them. Inshallah (to dumbly coin a phrase directed at a cruel god none of us believe in), it has helped him.

Last week, as he watched two nurses draw blood from his left antecubital fossa at 6.30am-ish, he composed a poem on the spot and and recited it to them before they’d done with fiddling about in his elbow.

It is absurd, life. Humans are clowns. Our desperate search for meaning while spinning around on this planet and suspended in a cold and indifferent universe is called existentialism, while absurdism just asks that we recognise the lack of meaning and do what we like with it.

Absurdism, though, is especially suited to dealing with the bad bits if you don’t believe in sky gods and woo woo. I ghosted an autobiography once for an author who took grim pleasure turning the administrative aftermath of death into a set piece on the pick n mix at Woollies. When Dad was first admitted to hospital and kept being endlessly moved he described it as Kafkaesque, even more so when his body was torturously changing before his eyes. Kafka’s book, Metamorphosis, describes a man turning into a creepy crawly, and is about as powerful an allegory for sudden disability as anything I can think of.

Absurdism is a coping mechanism for our situation, including that daily human sufferance of vain, arrogant, bad people who so frequently rise to power. Describing Trump and his gibberish spewing cronies is a gift to the cartoonists and satirists. Bad people are never good at laughing at themselves.

Charlie Hebdo pointing a satirical finger at the ridiculousness of religion so upset the death cult man boys of Islamic State that they had to walk into the magazine’s offices and slaughter 11 journalists and cartoonists in an editorial meeting.

Absurdity is a uniquely human thing. If you don’t have a sense of it, I pity you.

At 17 in the early sixties Dad was invited by his housemaster to be head of house for his last year at school. Dad announced that he was an Existentialist and no longer believed in God and said he would accept only on the condition he could set about dismantling the “inhumane” organised servitude of the fagging system, that frequently descended into abuse and bullying. Fagging was common in public schools until relatively recently (see this article from 1873).

Up until this point Dad was a school sweetheart, good at athletics and other sports, keen, brainy, popular and a chorister with a good voice. He was all geared up to go to Oxford to study medicine. But these pronouncements, especially the fagging one, proved a blow to Dad’s school career and his last year was spent at a technical college in Newcastle.

Going to Guy’s was probably better, he thinks, as it is a far more practical and hospital-led medical training and he loved the fact that Keats trained there too. “The only thing I lost really,” he says, “Was the chance to tell everyone I went to Oxford.”

He’s told me he wants all his kids to go and sit with the Keats statue outside the Guy’s student union and take a picture.

If he hadn’t gone to Guys, he wouldn’t have met my Mum and I’d not exist - but these aren’t my father’s thoughts, they’re mine.

Dad always says be a fool with insight. Probably pinched from Michel de Montaigne. I can’t say it built my confidence but it prepared me for life, and for Socrates and philosophy. I’ve repeated it over and over sometimes, like a mantra. Being a fool with insight helps with reflecting on mistakes and hubris in ways that I see, as Dad’d describe them, “puffed up and poncified” sorts struggling with.

Absurdist (Camus’: “Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason”) and existentialist (Sartre’s: “We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.”) thinking are quite similar, save only is joyful and the other is tortured.

Thinking on this, I allowed myself a little indulgent Google. Is there such a thing as existential absurdism? Because I think my Daddy is living it. We’ve had some good chats lately and I see in him a near lurid need to make some intellectual order from the awfulness. He’s calling people to say goodbye and tell them he loves and admires them.

I’m sticking all Dad’s writing on a Substack called Chekov’s Popgun.

Everything will be free to read but at some point I’ll find a way to split funds between Bristol Children’s Hospital, which he helped build into a serious centre for paediatric medicine; and the European Paediatric Soft Tissue Sarcoma Group (EpSSG), of which Dad is a founding figure.

The EpSSG developed a new more conservative treatment protocol for these complex cancers, which would effectively replace the existing American one in place that he said European surgeons agreed was unnecessarily brutally chemical. It is now best practice in most countries, increasing survival rates while reducing the amount of medication the patient was subjected to. It’s a complex disease to treat apparently. These are rare cancers in adults, but they amount to nearly 10% of cancers in children.

I’m slowly gathering all the academic stuff, too, which I will put on there too, tucked away. Because like writing about Christmas on a boiling day, I am not sure the treatment protocols for rare childhood cancers will increase traffic to my Substack, or his.

“Long Live Chazza”

I’ve got a great big juicy vein in my left antecubital fossa

And if you can’t get blood out of that then you’re a real tosser.

It’s taken a bit of a hammering with recent iffy health

And I regard this blessed thing as golden in its wealth.

It’s used for taking blood out, and for injecting in;

If someone went and buggered it, now that would be a sin.

I’ve decided veins are female and arteries are male.

Everyone be nice to her. I don’t want her to fail.

She’s cephalic, not basilic, so I can’t name her Bazza.

So the obvious nickname is to call her Chazza.

I do have other veins, and occasionally they’re used.

I think I’ll make a rota, so that Chazza’s not abused.

- Richard Spicer, Bath, 2026