Lesson 29. Section 1. The sad life of an old man.

Oh, yes, I remember. We were conducting a survey into the needs of disabled people in the borough in which I work in London.

And we got a request from an old man to go along and, and see him in connection with this survey.

Well, some of the people that I'd seen on the survey before were really quite poor and lived in very bad housing conditions. (Yes) They were also tended to be elderly and to really have some quite bad disabilities, so I was quite prepared for, for anything I thought that I might meet.

Anyway, I went along to, to this house, and this was not at all what I'd expected. It was a large house and really had an air of faded gentility about it. It was in a part of the borough which had once been quite fashionable.

Er, I knocked at the door and the old man, Mr Sinclair came to let me in and showed me into a back room, which he lived in.

The rest of the house, I think must have been shut up and he was just living in one or two rooms. How extraordinary!

Anyway, we started the interview which I had to conduct with him and he was very, very willing to talk but he never stopped grumbling.

He grumbled about young people, about the rising cost of living, about the government, about how the area had gone down, and so on and so forth. He didn't seem to have a good word to say for anybody at all.

Got a read chip on his shoulder? Well, he was. He was a really grumpy old man and not very likeable with it.