The knee bone’s connected to the ...red chilli pepper
RE: last week’s reference to the high incidence on Planet Corona of people falling asleep at work, Tom Moody tells when at a folk festival, he dozed off in the middle of performing a Morris dance.
Among the mini-poems sent in, this arrived from Rowena Sommerville;
There’s no disputin’/That Vladimir Putin’s/A horrible guy/I wish would die
Meantime, it’s been quite a week. Firstly, a question; what’s pink, then black, then red, and will be pink again? You’ll never get the answer, which is my leg. Confused? Understandable Enlightenment follows.
I was peddling round Cullercoats, high on excitement at the Toon v Liverpool match due in an hour’s time. I went too fast up a high pavement and Kapow! Thud!
There was only ever to be one winner in this crunch argument – the pavement.
The pavement is undamaged but your correspondent suffered a broken patella, aka the knee bone.
Thus in one instant are all immediate plans aborted and the universe drastically altered – or at least my own small version of it.
An extra irony is that this week’s piece is a milestone which I was ready to announce in celebratory tone. For it marks the two hundredth column. I have been inflicting these creations on an unsuspecting public since March 2020 when the coronavirus first made its presence felt and, unlike my knee bone, that two hundred sequence is unbroken, spanning continually those twenty six and a half months. Do I hear the gasps of “AMAZING” and “QUITE EXTRAORDINARY!”?
No, though as one wag recently said to me, “I suppose you’ll stop when you get it right”. Maybe. Maybe not.
My closest friends right now are a pair of crutches. I go nowhere without them, though in truth I don’t go very far at all. I am also highly visible via my Red Leg. Once the nurses had fitted the plaster cast at North Tyneside Hospital, they asked, did I want a stretch cover and if so, what colour?
I chose bright red so the leg now resembles a giant chilli pepper. I am trying to become the Red Leg’s friend and overcome initial hostility on how much it has drastically altered my life. Of course it is not the leg’s fault.
Of more practical concern are those once small unconsidered tasks which now take on mega significance and also take three times as long. Moving from A to B, albeit A is in close proximity to B, can be a military exercise; the passage from kitchen to living room, for instance.
The Red Leg is straight and obviously unbending and bangs into things which a conventional leg would not.
I was also prescribed painkillers which I took half-heartedly, aware of firstly my reluctance to indulge any medication, and secondly my unease at swallowing a medicine which contains in its title the word “killer”. I have now switched to my son Dylan’s CBD products.
What preceded this plaster cast, (unsuccessfully) was the hospital’s huge black leg support which looked like a Transformer limb. Its inexplicably complicated structure was held together by around 500 separate lengths of Velcro. This dreadfully ugly vista frightened me.
How strange to be scared of your own leg.
Luckily the Velcro Hell constantly fell down and I graduated to the plaster proper. In all this, there was my nagging sense of guilt that at a time when NHS staff were exhausted and the system close to breakdown, I was diverting valuable resources from elsewhere.
Your activity rate drops hugely with a plaster cast leg. You see fewer people, fewer places, have fewer experiences. There is less stimulation. I move slowly, cautiously, painfully. I feel old. I feel useless. I feel an imposition – especially on my brilliant partner Kitty who is always there when I need her. Which at present is very often.
I must learn stoicism, a Zen-like calm, adaptability. I must breathe deeply. I must stop feeling sorry for myself.
Meantime, do feel free to send grapes.
■ Planet Corona – the First 100 Columns, IRON Press £8
■ pmortimer@xlnmail.com