Same foot, different day.

I have had a small disaster.

Actually, it is a large, fat, throbbing disaster. It is where a large and heavy lump of firewood clattered painfully down on to my big toe this morning whilst I was pegging out washing.

My toe has gone black. The nail has gone black. It hurts like a very sore thing. That much.

Fortunately, how lucky I am, it is the foot that I was limping on anyway. It is my clutch foot, not my brake foot. This means I am not completely disabled, which I would have been had I been misfortunate enough for it to have been the Good Foot.

It is not the good foot. I still have a single, perfectly functional foot.

I am pleased about this.

I am very glad to have found something to be pleased about because otherwise I am not at all happy. It hurts a very lot. It is so painful that I can’t bear to put a sock over it, never mind a shoe, and it is pulsing like a party strobe light. I am limping like a retired cart horse all over again.

It was a very horrid moment. I staggered back into the house, gasping and swearing, and put some ice into a plastic bag to wrap around it. This hurt almost too much to be bearable, and then leaked out into a puddle on the floor, which I have been walking in all day ever since.

I called Mark then, so that he could share in the misery, there is no fun in having an agonising injury by oneself. He made some sympathetic noises, he is quite good at those, but failed to make the pain disappear. Eventually he suggested I took some drugs, which I did. I do not know if they helped or not. If they did then I would not like to imagine the pain if they hadn’t.

I pointed out that the back yard might be in need of a health and safety assessment, but he said that he thought that particular horse had already bolted, and I had to agree, albeit rather ruefully, that he was right.

You will not be surprised to learn that this slowed down my activities quite considerably for the rest of the day. Fortunately most of it was the usual cooking chores, mayonnaise and biscuits, sausages and chicken, all of that sort of thing, which largely involved standing on one leg wallowing about in self-pity whilst my big toe increased in size and glowed, brightly, like a red-and-purple lighthouse.

Oliver came with me up to Booths later on, to carry the shopping and make sympathetic noises about old people who can’t look where they’re going. Also he bravely went into the back yard to bring the washing in, which as we all know now is a labour beset with perils, and for which I was very grateful.

Afterwards I hobbled up the stairs to sit at the computer. I did not intend to sit at the computer. I intended to do some painting, but when I got there I was distracted by the discovery that part of our marks for our Master’s’s’ coursework had been released.

I might have mentioned that I am doing a Master’s’s’ degree at Cambridge, by the way, I can’t remember if I told you. Anyway, the lecturers are all on strike because it seems Cambridge feels that the glorious cachet of being able to describe oneself as a lecturer at Cambridge should be sufficient recompense in itself for their labours. The professors involved, whilst acknowledging the magnificence of such a title, also feel that they would like some money, so they are refusing to mark anybody’s homework until they get some. I might not have exactly been paying attention but it is something like that.

Anyway, because of this we only have part of our marks, not all of them. One of the problems of setting homework for a Creative Writing degree is that it is difficult to come up with something with multiple-choice answers, which can easily be marked, so every lecturer has to plough through pages and pages of all our witterings. I imagine this must be tiresome.

Anyway, obviously all other activities stopped with this magnificent excuse for a shirk, whilst I read and re-read my marks and the lecturers comments, and ploughed obsessively through everything I had written to see what I could have done better, obviously I found loads.

I sighed and wished I could do it again, but too late, the die were cast.

If it is one dice it was cast. If it is two die then they were cast. Just saying, in the interests of accuracy.

Not that it mattered. I had got a Distinction anyway.