Foot Notes

It’s been an interesting week.
I’ve been cleaning out the big walk-in cupboard at the top of the stairs. A couple of months ago the ceiling collapsed. Dust and bits of plaster everywhere. It was where we shoved everything that didn’t have a home anywhere else. Drum cases, suitcases full of old clothes, all our old games and boxes of I don’t know what. Alan, a builder friend of ours, is coming to fix it next week so it has to be done. The house is full of piles of dusty things. Meanwhile we’re having a party tomorrow so the piles of things are being stored in our bedroom, which is getting quite difficult to enter.
As I write this we should be at the supermarket buying the food and drink. We’ve around 80 people coming. But a couple of things happened to slow us down.
First, Jill sprained her foot. Just went over on it in the garden on Tuesday night. We went to the casualty department of the hospital in Hastings where a nurse assessed us – Yes, she said, you’ll need to see the doctor and have it X-rayed. It seemed a fair assessment. There were four other injured parties in there. It shouldn’t be too long, the nurse said, we’re fairly quiet.
After about an hour the pain was getting too much for Jill to bear so I hailed a nurse and he gave Jill some painkillers, which helped. After about another hour and a half we finally got to see the doctor. You’ll need that X-rayed, he said. So we went back into the waiting room and waited. Only twenty minutes this time. After the X-ray we had to go and wait in the waiting room again.
An hour later we saw the doctor. It’s not broken, he said, just put it in a Tubular Bandage (great album BTW), take painkillers and we’ll give you some crutches. The swelling and bruising should go down in a couple of days.
To be fair – we only had to wait another half an hour for the bandage and the crutches.
We were there four and a half hours. Ridiculous. On the way out we passed someone who had come in with a badly scratched arm. He’d set up a little tent outside and was brewing up a cup of tea on a small camp fire. He was expecting to be seen around September!
Then, last night, at around 9.30, we had a power cut. We often get them – being out in the country and all. So we lit lots of candles and waited. Jill was giving a radio interview on the phone at 11 so she assembled her notes and lots of candles, found a phone that didn’t need electricity, got her foot comfy on a stool and waited. No power and so she did the interview by candlelight.
Woke up this morning. Still no power. We’re all electric here in the country. So - what do you miss most when the electricity goes down? A cup of coffee. I was about to fire up the barbecue when the power finally returned. Desperate or what?
All back to normal now, though. And the computer’s working again too. (That broke yesterday – turns out to be the monitor so I’ve borrowed the monitor from Jill’s office.)
Hey ho. A week in the life. No poems on this blog. I’ll sort something out for the next one. Can’t think what to write about…