I am on the taxi rank.
Rather improbably, this has become something of an adventure.
It is an adventure because I am newly, albeit temporarily, disabled. I have hurt my foot.
Those words do not do sufficient justice to the purple rugby ball, ending in five miniature rugby balls, currently pulsing at the end of my leg.
It is sore.
Fortunately it is my clutch foot, which can be plied without too much difficulty and danger. If it was my brake foot I would have to stay at home and then we would be starving to death as well.
How very fortunate we are.
I do not know what I did. I was pegging out washing in the back garden on Friday afternoon, balancing on the bench that Mark installed there for that very purpose. My next recollection is of lying in a crumpled heap on the ground with agonising pain in my foot, which was inconveniently folded sideways, and clothes pegs all over the place.
I was immediately very sorry for myself. Mark has been sympathetic as well, but it is small beer compared to the swimming-pool of self pity in which I have been bathing ever since.
The dogs were quite worried about me, which I have to say was entirely unhelpful. It is quite bad enough to have become unexpectedly one-legged without the enthusiastic assistance of furry creatures with waving tails helpfully snuffling in your ears.
I do not remember how I got back into the house. I remember standing dizzily at the back door, wondering if I was going to die, and yelling at the dogs to get out from under my remaining foot.
I collapsed on the conservatory sofa and the dogs leaped up to join me. Then I sat there for a while, gasping and shuddering, and admiring its sudden unexpected rotundity.
If you are going to have an injury, it needs to look spectacular. Nothing is as terrible as an invisible agony.
Fortunately, this one fits the bill very well indeed. It is purple and black, and is still so massively swollen that you can practically see it throbbing.
You will be pleased to hear that I am being very ostentatiously courageous. It has become one of those times when a limp does not need to be exaggerated in order to gain sympathy, but in fact has to be downplayed in order that nobody says You Shouldn’t Be At Work. I am bravely getting on with my life and saying Oh No Don’t Worry About Me.
Irritatingly, this means that nobody does.
When first I did it I thought, after the initial excruciating discomfort had worn off, that at least now I would be able to spend my entire life sitting at my desk editing my story. Alas, this turns out not to be in the least true. What has actually happened is that everything else still needs doing with exactly the same urgency, but now takes me twice as long. I have brought a stool into the kitchen on which I can prop my knee whilst washing up or getting dinners ready, and when Mark came home, he popped out to the chemist for a tubular bandage, but that is it. Life, it turns out, has got to Go On.
No, of course I didn’t go to Accident And Emergency. Quite apart from the obvious nuisance of the nearest one being an hour’s drive away, we all know perfectly well that once you get there you have got to sit in an uncomfortable plastic chair for the next twelve hours, listening to the bellowing of small children and the criminally insane, whilst nurses step over piles of blood and sick in frantic attempts to stop people dying before the one doctor who is covering all the emergencies north of Preston, can dash past you shouting a prescription for antibiotics.
When you come out you have caught MRSA and have to go home so at least you can die somewhere that is peaceful and hygienic.
Number One Daughter thought I might have torn a bit of bone off along with the ligament, and that I ought not to enter any marathon races for a couple of weeks. She reassured me that medical assistance probably wouldn’t be much more helpful than anything I was doing at home, and that I ought to sit with it in the air.
I will definitely do this when I get home and the steering wheel isn’t in the way any more.
She said it would be better in six weeks.
No fell walking this week.
I am cross with myself.
