A Litany Of Recent Injuries

Having nothing interesting to say, and wanting to say it anyway, I’m going to talk about the utter clobbering my poor body has recently taken.

After Saturday’s party I came home with hundreds of grazes and bruises and lacerations of unknown origin. I don’t like drunken injuries, they’re annoying. I want to know why my legs are in the most part a freaky shade of green-grey, thank you very much. Preferably I’d rather they were a nice normal skin-like colour, and preferably vaguely tanned, but never mind.

On Monday I somehow found myself up the allotment, so I have bramble scratches all over my arms and legs and also burnt the backs of my legs. Joys. I also ache a bit from hours of allotmenting and the beating I took at the gym the other day – I got very into it, and it was good, but ow.

On Tuesday I ended up in a lake, as I may have mentioned, culminating in various dubious-looking lake-based injuries, but thankfully not AIDS, typhoid or Legionairre’s, all of which were threats hurled at us from the banks by the non-swimmers!

Wednesday was by far the worst of the lot – in orchestra, where normally I show up for two or three rehearsals before the summer concert, play the cello, and go home again, I am this year masquerading as a double-bassist. Now. Double basses have thicker strings than cellos. They are also played in an entirely different way. Furthermore, if you are a bassist you are surely used to spending about half your time playing pizzicato, i.e. plucking the strings rather than playing arco, with the bow. I am not a bassist. I play the cello. I don’t do pizzicato and I certainly don’t do snapped pizz., where you pluck hard enough to make the string snap against the fingerboard. Which is why I ended up with a gigantic blood blister on my right-hand middle finger. I am considering putting varnish on my middle finger to give it an artificial protective carapace for the duration of my short-lived career as a bassist.

And just now, to add insult – and more injury – to injury, I peeled about three or four layers of skin off the top of my foot with my razor in an attempt to shave very very fast with a razor I thought was a lot blunter than it turned out to be.

Here’s to the next week being a little more successful. But then, as I am so frequently reminded, I define malco-ordination, I am that clumsy. This is little more than I deserve, I guess.