I am usually a very cheerful person.
Not today.
I shuffled round the supermarket like the third wet weekend in a row, which, to be fair, we have had. I didn’t look up at the sky wondering how much more rain there could be because that’s a good way of getting an eyeful of rain.
When I made the bendy twenty-fourth scale people I used to do cheerful old ladies and miserable old men, which made everyone laugh, but today I’m a miserable excessively mature person myself.
I think it’s mainly the pain getting me down.
Yesterday, as there was a break in the rain, I got off my exercise bike and dashed outside into the garden to get the lawns mown before the rain began again. The front lawn is down a slight incline, or up a small step, depending on which way you’re going. Going up I stubbed my toe, failed to correct in time and found myself falling, so I did a slight hop along the concrete, still having a substantial scar on my face from the last time I fell on the drive.
I plunged headlong into the flower bed, currently covered with fallen camellias. Flat, thanks to gravity, I took stock and the camellia out of my eye, was briefly very grateful that nothing seemed to be broken, cautiously raised myself and hobbled indoors where the OH was sitting in the warm and dry watching the television. Not rushing to help but happily remarking that I had grass on my chin, he watched while I inched into the lift and went to wash the soil off my forehead. I discovered I had a graze on one knee, which is the knee that has never worked properly since I fell on it twenty years ago. Thank goodness I garden in jeans, which are quite substantial. I also had a huge bruise which didn’t become evident until later.
Downstairs, I sat for a while, while the OH sniffed and huffed in disapproval. I think he thought I was doing old lady falling over. I was not. What I had done was rigid toe falling.
During the pandemic (remember that?), desperate to prolong the summer and in the middle of building and decorating, I had foolishly worn sandals with bare feet in November and had thus managed effortlessly to break the second toe on my right foot by walking into a wooden drawer with a hard corner. I knew I had broken it, there was a definite clue when it turned black, but no power on earth was going to persuade me to go to A&E to catch Covid when you could get it with much less waiting around by visiting a supermarket. I was far too busy with builders and decorators to waste half an hour of my life listening to the dire warnings on the surgery number, prior to not being given an appointment.
So I left it. The black toe eventually went a normal colour and began to rest on the big toe next to it. It continued to do so until it was a very strange shape and decorated with a blister on one side and a callous on the other. Four days ago I went to the chemist, who had a splint for very nearly every body part that could require splinting except a toe. Therefore it was two days ago that the postman brought the online-purchased toe splint, which I was wearing fresh and inexperienced whilst negotiating the step up (or down, depending) in my wellies. This is why I could not compensate for the trip by a swiftly planted, flexed toe welly on the other foot. I was more useless than a Dalek at the bottom of a flight of stairs. (I have been told they fly now, but I watched them in the sixties when they looked like several strips of hardboard, a colander and a sink plunger, marginally disguising an actor in an electric wheelchair*.)
Today my thumb is demonstrating the painful swelling that occurs when the glucosamine runs out. My knee is huge and throbbing, the graze is rubbing on my trousers and my toes are rigid and pulsating. My intestines have joined in, they tend to go on strike post surgically faster than railway workers.
I have tried really hard to be very grateful that nothing is broken, but have discovered that in the face of persistent pain, and a slight pain in the face, thumbthing up with a hand, a rubbish toe and a badly mown lawn**, it is difficult to be cheerful.
So, just for today, I am a miserable old git.
The only good bit is that when I broke my right arm I became ambidextrous, so I will make some cards with my left hand, later, until I feel better.
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*There could be a good reason for this resemblance.
**This is not a euphemism, the lawn looks as if it has been cut with an ice cream scoop.