Playing your cards right

'What about that one?' asks Beth.

'No. Sorry. Too .......green.'

'Well, how about this?'

'No...it's that rolling, endless landscape. It's like a peep into eternity.'

'It's not, Mum. It's just some fields and things. You're reading too much into it.'

We're in town and I'm in search of a greetings card. Beth is currently being Perfect Child and, given her behaviour in the last episode, quite right too.

The card has got to be blank, neutral yet cheering but in a restrained sort of way.

Yet another friend has been diagnosed with some grim sounding ailment and is about to be whisked into hospital for tests, more tests, surgery and no doubt a bonus dose of MRSA if she fails to express sufficient gratitude for her treatment.

So it's card time. And there's nothing like hunting for one whose picture balances empathy with a judicious amount of optimism to throw me into a kind of shop-induced coma.

I have only to see the words 'blank inside,' on a dinky piece of folded cardboard to feel exactly the same way.

'It's those pictures,' I tell Beth. 'They're all landscapes with hills. And what do you get with hills?'

'A great view? Snow? Sore legs? I dunno.'

'Valleys,' I say, with a certain bleak triumph.

'Yeah......So?'

'The Valley of Death,' I say.

She looks as blank as one of the cards.

'So what you could read into that card is an implication that they might not get better.'

'She'll just be pleased to get a card. Nobody analyses get-well cards.'

'I do,' I say. 'Somebody sent me a picture of lillies in a vase once and it took Francis two weeks to convince me it wasn't a death threat in code.'

We gaze together at the rows of stationery.

'And that's another thing,' I say. 'Have you noticed there's never anything living in those blank cards.'

'There's trees. Flowers.'

'Yes, but there's no animals. No people. Nothing apart from endless vegetation. What does that suggest to you?'

'A bunch of crap artists who couldn't draw animals.'

'No. It suggests the solitude of death.'

Beth gives up, chooses a card for me and propels me towards the checkout. She is, sadly, bigger than me, and I am powerless to resist.

Just after we've paid, Vicky sends me a text announcing the arrival of an exciting and possibly fatal new illness in one of our previously disease- free friends.

'Is there anything I can do?' I ask.

'Shouting "God's a ******* **** might help,"' she texts back. Despite myself, I laugh out loud.