Dearie me, I am footsore.
My toe has gone as black as a very black thing. It is not like a black person’s toe because they are only brown really. It is black like a greyish, black-and-purple slug-like thing, and it has become so fat that my toenail has begun to flake off, curling in at the edges and slowly peeling away.
I do not think the word Agony would be too much of an exaggeration here. Certainly it is a good description of my non-drugged state.
Fortunately I am drugged almost all of the time, which is what is making life bearable. I know you are not supposed to take codeine for very long before you get addicted, but frankly at this stage I really do not care. If spending the rest of my life as a tragic drugged ruin, sleeping in bus shelters and begging with an old Costa Coffee cup, is the price I must pay for not feeling the anguished stabbing misery of my toenail-woes, then so be it, it has been nice knowing you all.
Surprisingly it is not too bad when I am sitting down with it sticking up in the air, but life is not like that and today there were a lot of things I had to do before work.
I had to go shopping all by myself, without even Oliver’s tactful support, because he has gone to work as well, and worse, I realised just as I was leaving that the drugs were starting to run out, but I went anyway.
I was sweating with pain by the time I hobbled back indoors, and dived into the drug-drawer, called by Oliver the Mummy Drawer, because of containing drugs, chocolate buttons and To Do lists, with a self-pitying groan. Then I collapsed in front of the computer to distract myself until they started to work.
I occupied a very interesting hour looking at houses that Lucy might like to purchase. She is considering becoming a home-owner, and the entire family has joined in the search with fascinated enthusiasm. We have all got entirely different opinions about the qualities necessary for an ideal home, so she is going to have to be fairly determined to stand up to us all, because we all Know Best, especially me.
I sent her half a dozen of my favourites, some of which she liked and some of which she didn’t, but by then the drugs were working, so I had no excuse for shirking any longer, and I had to go and clean and hoover the house, and water the conservatory.
We are going away on Sunday, possibly even Saturday night after work. First there is Oliver’s cricket match, and then we are off to supervise Lucy’s interview, and so there is some considerable preparation to be done, starting with watering the conservatory and working my way up through cooking things to take with us, concluding with leaving the house tidy, because if we were to be killed in an horrific camper van disaster on the motorway I would not wish to be embarrassed by our inheritors discovering dusty shelves or untidily-filled drawers when they come to get a valuation on the house. We have standards to maintain.
Also we cannot rely on being killed and I do not want to have to to come home to an untidy house..
Hence I swept and mopped and polished and hoovered, and by the time I had finished the drugs had run out again, so I had to take some more.
In the end I had to give up, and collapsed with my paints, which was brilliant, because of it being the sort of shirk with which I can have a completely clear conscience.
I painted until it was time to go to work, at which point I realised that I was late, had left the potatoes boiling for too long, and that the washing was still on the line.
If you can imagine an elderly person trying cautiously to hurry around a scarily dangerous back yard, with a pronounced limp and a great deal of bad language you will have a good picture of my final acts of domesticity for the day.
I am going to go away.
It is time I took some more drugs.
