You know that thing they say about pride going before a fall? Yes, well. Yesterday I was pretty proud of myself, what with one thing and another. And today… I made another attempt at unpowered flight, but yet again failed dismally.
The funny thing – not funny ha-ha, but funny slightly odd – is that last night I dreamed that I was standing on a chair to put the box of wrapping paper rolls back in the high cupboard in my study where it generally lives, overbalanced, and did a Fosbury flop over the chair back, crashing down onto some boxes of children’s toys and doing yet more damage to my spine. I was so affected by this dream that when I actually put away the wrapping paper this morning I asked R to stand next to the chair while I climbed on it, so that if necessary I could fall on him instead. Happily that didn’t happen, and once back on terra firma (-ish: it’s an old house) I took myself off to the kitchen and began preparing a slow-cooked saffron lamb casserole for this evening’s family dinner.
Everything was going very nicely, thank you, right up until I decided to pop down to the garden to throw some kitchen scraps onto the top lawn for the birds. Should have put shoes on, instead of going out in the slippers I was wearing. Should have taken off my reading glasses. Didn’t do either of those things – because I was just nipping to the end of the patio, right? Five metres, max. On the way back, moving at speed because there was a batch of lamb cubes sealing on the stove that I needed to turn before they over-browned, I caught my left foot on the raised corner of a loose flagstone, became briefly airborne, and then crashed full length, face down on the flags, completely winding myself, and only just managing to get my hands up in time to protect my face.
For several seconds I couldn’t move or breathe, and even when I did get enough air into my flattened lungs to be able to call out, there was no point shouting because R was upstairs, vacuuming the bedrooms, and wouldn’t have been able to hear me anyway. So I gradually and painfully peeled myself off the patio, stood up, assessed the immediate damage, decided it wasn’t terminal, and went back to the cooker. By the time R heard what had happened, the frying pan was off the heat and I was hunting for plasters to patch up my badly grazed hands. I was also shaking like a jelly and playing merry hell about the patio, which has needed replacing for as long as we’ve been here, but I’ll spare you the details of that rant. R thought it was strange that this accident happened within a few hours of my dream, and I agree that it is an odd piece of synchronicity, but I certainly don’t think the dream was prophetic – if anything, having put away the wrapping paper and survived, I may have been even less cautious than usual in scuttling across the patio. So while I’m totally cool with being thought of as an absolute witch, I make no claim at all to being clairvoyant.
After lunch we had to make a quick journey into Stratford, to pick up a thank you gift for the friends who are kindly lending us a holiday apartment for the next three nights, and collect a prescription from Stratford Hospital that had only just been sent through from Warwick. While R went to the hospital pharmacy, I limped round to the Minor Injuries unit to check their opening hours over the holiday, and the receptionist took one look at me and told me I shouldn’t go anywhere until I’d at least spoken to the triage nurse. We were on a very tight schedule though, if we were going to get back home before the Cardiff crew arrived, and I found myself backing away from the desk while making the kind of lame excuses I suspect she must have heard a hundred times before. Certainly, she looked extremely unimpressed.
As was L, when she heard what had been going on. She’d take me back to Minor Injuries now, she said. Too late, I replied – which, to be fair, it was by this point. Cue eye roll. We can go tomorrow, I said, if it hasn’t eased overnight: they’re open from ten till four. Cue suspicious frown from daughter, and mother babbling apologetically – and then thinking WHY AM I BEING APOLOGETIC?? IT’S ME WHO’S SUFFERING HERE. But, as my late mother-in-law was fond of saying, a mother’s place is in the wrong.
Anyway, you’ll be relieved to hear that the saffron lamb casserole was a minor triumph, and I was forbidden from preparing the vegetables that went with it because of my war wound. So that was a result. The grandsons (seen in my second photo watching Despicable Me from their favourite viewing position on the trampoline) were very sweet and funny all evening, though the Boy Wonder’s pre-Christmas excitement had reached a level at which I feared the top of his head might actually blow off. They were both disappointed to hear that H was delayed on his journey from the Frozen North, but the Baby Brother in particular was relieved to hear that he would be arriving overnight. “Hayyee mowwow,” he said happily, while demolishing a tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
Family times are definitely the best times.
R: L2, C3, D5.
