Running

A week of relative domestic calm after Sarah ran the marathon last weekend. Not only did she manage it in 4.46.59 – best rounded down, I am assured – but she was less stiff the next day than I was, having had to spend all day trotting around London with the kids. Thoroughly impressive/annoying all round. And, despite having spent two hours on Tower Bridge cheering on sweaty runners dressed as bakewell tarts, I am still in the bad books over the whole business, as we managed to miss seeing Sarah, and technical difficulties meant that I didn’t manage to get around to sponsoring her myself. Despite the lack of Brownie points though, I am still very impressed and proud of her. Even though I am still sure she started her running hobby weeks after my accident just to rub things in.

William has been doing some running too. We went for a picnic yesterday in the salubrious setting of South Norwood Country Park. I’m not sure if a patch of grass between Tesco’s, a pair of tram tracks and an athletics stadium truly qualifies as the country, but by South London standards, it does a good job. While we were doing our best to tuck into our cream buns, William was determined to fully explore the mountaineering possibilities afforded by the hillock that passes for South Norwood’s highest point. He was a little confused by the fact that he hasn’t figured out the difference between up and down, but that didn’t stop him toddling as far up the slope as he could get, then hurtling down, entirely out of control, and playing Russian roulette with the smashed glass that littered the path. He was having a wonderful time. “William’s having fun!” he told us. Unfortunately, Daddy had to follow, hobbling desperately down the hill, looking for all the world like a confused entrant to a three legged race. The William/Daddy combination must cut a fairly impressive dash these days.

This is going to be an important week for William. It throws my own growing relationship with the orthopaedics community of South London into some sort of relief when you are invited to Birmingham children’s hospital to discuss the possibilities of an intestinal transplant for your son. These are extremely rare, and extremely dangerous operations. I’m not sure it will be right for the boy, as we are yet to be told why it might work. I think a degree of scepticism is essential though, as there is nothing more dangerous than imagining that a huge operation is the way forward, simply because it is something that can be done. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons for this Friday’s meeting. It is going to be a very nervous trip down the M40.

At least we should be able to make the trip with me at the steering wheel. My hand is getting better very quickly, I am pleased to report, and two Velcro straps on my fingers are now the only visible sign of the mishap. It looks entirely likely that I will have had the time to break my hand and make a complete recovery in the space between two routine appointments for my leg. It tells you something when you attend a ‘hand therapy’ session, and find your therapists crowded around an x-ray of your leg, making impressed noises. There are still a few things that I can’t do with my hand, though. As one of these things is the washing up, I am actually quite disposed to enjoying this injury. However, as I had to point out to a trainee therapist who was busy ticking the relevant boxes on a form describing my hand injury, just because I meant to hit the furniture, does not mean that it was an example of ‘deliberate self-harm’. Unless, of course, the DSH box stood for ‘deliberate sofa harm’. I’m guessing it didn’t.

Jihad

Back to school, and, yesterday, back to Glyndebourne for a meeting with the boss. It was a very odd experience travelling back to Lewes. The last time I was there, I left work and was a bloody mess in A&E a few hours later. That was in July 2006. Apparently, amongst my very first incoherent ramblings was an exhortation that nobody should tell Glyndebourne, as I felt I’d be making it back shortly. It now appears as if, audition notwithstanding, I will finally make it back in March/April 2008. Almost two years after the accident. I was quietly hoping that I might make it onto this autumn’s tour, but I must admit that, if I was my own boss, I wouldn’t have hired me for September. So I can’t really get cross about it. The tour is going to be a tough one, and everybody else will have learnt the operas this summer. And the biggest production – Macbeth, in case we needed any more bad luck - is in kilts. I'm not sure the delicate opera-going public is quite ready for the public exposure of my right calf. So, come July, I will potentially be without a job until March, and trying to persuade a new set of people that I am a fine employment prospect whilst hobbling in to an audition room looking like an extra from Casualty. You have to be tenacious to be an opera singer. But things are starting to get ridiculous. Until somebody writes ‘Emergency ward 10 – the opera’, I am screwed.

In the meantime, it’s back to teaching. My pupils were universally thoughtful enough to find my broken hand hilariously amusing. I can’t say that I blame them. My early attempts at marking homework might just have well have been in runic for all their legibility. I am having to nominate board scribes. And, after my own makeshift coat-hanger splint, St. George’s finally provided me with a plastic, scoop shaped affair that makes my classroom rhetorical gestures look as though I’m cleaning crumbs off a table.

Things that become impossibly difficult whilst wearing a hand splint:

1. Shaking hands with people. The question about the left handed shake then arises. Does it have Masonic connections? Along with my recent enforced predilection for one-legged pairs of trousers, is there a theme here?

2. Changing William’s pyjamas at 2 o’clock in the morning. All those poppers. Ridiculous.

3. Using two crutches. Apparently, according to my physio, a good thing in the long run, but leading to a great deal of not insignificant ankle pain.

4. Driving. So I have to walk a mile from the station to work. See no. 3.

5. Chopping food. I got as far as mixing the curry paste the other day, before realising that chopping onions was going to be an insurmountable obstacle. We had some cold beef in the fridge. I resorted to tearing at it like a Neanderthal. Satisfying, but ultimately quite uncivilized. As for using a knife and fork in the staff dining room, I have been in real trouble. Very difficult to hold a serious conversation whilst gnawing a complete chicken breast on the end of a fork.

6. Using button flies. Which adorn the only pair of decent trousers I have that fit over my leg. Insult. Injury. And quite serious indignity in public toilets.

All of which serves me right for breaking my hand in the first place, I suppose. Though I am now suspecting a cause for all this bad luck. In an idle moment, I googled ‘blegspot’. And found this site in Arabic amongst only five or six results. Is it Jihad? Am I the domestic front of some middle-eastern terror campaign? Was the sofa tampered with? Or do I need to rediscover a sense of persective? Now that I've broken my hand, maybe I should change my blog's name. To Blandspot? Maybe not.

Guess What?!

I think this picture captures the essential spirit of Easter. Certainly my weekend was dominated by the cocoa bean, not least because I also received my birthday present from Sarah – membership of the ‘chocolate tasting club’. Very dangerous. One of those presents, I suspect, that will mean more expenditure from me, as I will struggle to let the monthly red cross parcels run out after six months.

The children chose to celebrate Easter in their own ways. Once they had finished arranging their mountains of chocolate into different bowls, the girls chose to commemorate the season with an ‘Easter Show’. Very engaging and edifying. Especially at the moment when the inevitable artistic differences arose, and Hope broke off mid prayer to blaspheme heartily. William was obviously unimpressed both by the chocolate-fest and the more spiritual aspects of the season. Chocolate eggs were replaced by the Henry engine that he’d been hanging out for, and his dodgy eyesight led to him mistaking the crown of thorns for a spider, and regaling the congregation of St. Mildred’s with a rendition of Incey Wincey spider at a critical moment in the Good Friday service. He rarely lets me down.

By Easter Monday morning, a combination of cocoa overload, all round frustration with William’s fiddly new pump and general malaise led me to a moment of fragile temper. Moments after I had brought my fist down on the sofa arm, I knew I was in trouble. The picture tells the sorry tale. I have broken my hand. Bugger.

We managed to spend the day taking the kids around an urban farm, but by the evening, with my hand twice its normal size, I thought a trip to A&E would be wise. After returning from the x-ray booth where I now hold a loyalty card and where I was due the next day for a routine x-ray of my leg, the doctor, barely able to disguise her mirth, showed me the good news, and told me that it would need pinning.

In fact, two days later, the ‘hand clinic’ has decided that a plaster cast splint should do the trick, so my bionic bits shouldn’t have to extend above the waist. But I am beginning to look like the willing volunteer in a first aid class. An eye-patch and comedy head bandage would pretty much complete the picture. And I will need a better story than the truth when I face my pupils next week. My medical notes describe the injury as following a ‘karate chop style blow’. Whilst I am not sure that being described as Jackie Chan will improve my chances of being taken seriously in clinic, I can see the benefits of this reputation in the classroom. Perhaps this is the solution. The only other face saving solution has been to blame the inferior quality of the sofa. But perhaps I should never have thought of trusting the upholstery of something described in the IKEA catalogue as an ‘EKESKOG’. I should have heard and recognised the overtones of a Nordic avenger.

There is a website called ‘mybrokenleg.com’. There is not one called ‘mybrokenhand.com’. There is a reason for this. It is very difficult to type using only your left hand. Perhaps it’s out there, but spelled ‘shtswsfdbfb.vom’. Or the equivalent. Either way, my blogs may be a little shorter for a while.

Sunshine

Is somebody trying to tell me something? Here I am, gradually trying to re-establish myself as a singer, and the concerts I’ve been hired for so far include one set of evening vespers and three performances of Verdi’s Requiem. What is all this doom and gloom hinting at? The death of my career perhaps? Or maybe, given the way I feel after twenty minutes on the rowing machine I’ve borrowed from Bockers, my impending actual demise. Meanwhile, and perhaps just to rub it in, I’ve been written to by Harrow school, asking if I’m interested in working for them as an English teacher. My life is beginning to resemble ‘Mr. Chips, the tour’.

In the interests of retaining focus, I finally managed to arrange a singing lesson last week. The first since the accident. Not, perhaps, surprising, seeing as the route there includes three separate tube lines, and rather too much escalator and stair involvement for my liking. But I got there, and it was a glorious hour. Not only was I gratified to learn that breaking my face hasn’t, at least, rendered me utterly voiceless, but I was hugely glad just to feel my old sense of purpose flooding back. David, my teacher, was phlegmatic about my chances of making an early triumphant re-entry into the world of opera, but seemed encouraged that my first booked engagement is as an armed man in The Magic Flute. I’m guessing my robotic leg will only add to the effect.

In the meantime, William has returned home from his latest hospital stay. He is delighted to be back, mainly because he has been reunited with his box of ‘engines’. He has started to notice the few gaps in his Thomas collection too, and is dropping the sort of subtle hints that only two-and-a-half year olds can get away with. ‘Where’s Henry?’ ‘Henry on the table.’ That sort of thing. Unbeknownst to him, I’ve been carrying Henry in my bag for the last week, and am now less than convinced that I should give it to him and seem to be acceding to his demands. I’ll probably give in though. And risk producing a horribly spoilt toddler. Damn my weakness.

On a day like today, however, it is difficult to reject feelings of the milk of human kindness. I am out in the garden in Tooting, enjoying the sunshine that is flooding everybody else’s gardens, but not mine, as it is in perpetual shade. Still, I have smeared my skin grafts in factor 50, put on a pair of shorts, and intend to go out on the streets soon, and scare the locals. And, as I write, a small patch of sunshine has illuminated the corner of the moss-ridden, cat litter tray that I like to call my garden. So I’m off to go and stand in it.