Happy birthday, Lauren!

Lessons From My Body

I'm going about this all wrong. I should be paying more attention to my arm.

Late on Tuesday night I managed to scald myself badly by pouring boiling water over my right wrist. (We won't concern ourselves with the details, suffice to say a cat, a hot water bottle and a zombie were involved.)
At first it didn't hurt at all. I did what you're supposed to in these situations and ran it under the tap for 20 minutes (the hiss of the water drowning out the screams of the dams - no showers for me for a week) and afterwards it felt cold and numb.

"How lucky to have escaped so lightly," I thought.
"This is a nasty wound indeed and yet I feel no pain at all."

The Banana was unconvinced.
"Wake me up," she said, "when you decide you need some burn cream."

It stayed numb until I went to bed, and then it started to hurt like several kinds of bitch. I tried stuffing it under the pillow, resting it on my stomach, putting it behind my head, hanging it out the side of the sheet and jamming it into my armpit, all to no avail. In the end I just had to lie there and wait for the burning to subside enough to let me sleep.

I woke substantially grumpier than usual but pleasantly surprised to find I was still alive. The burn didn't look that bad, no worse than having very carelessly applied a particularly unfortunate shade of fake tan. The skin was tender, stiff and sore to the touch, so I moved my watch onto the other wrist and found a gentle moisturiser to soothe it. I washed my hair with one hand to keep it away from hot water, the thing that caused the damage in the first place.

I am watching the wound get worse before it gets better. Now it's over the initial shock my wrist is angry and raw, but I am treating it gently. Every time I look down I remember that I have hurt myself, but I know from experience that the colour will fade as the skin gradually heals. I will forgive the cat and let him out of the garage, and in the end I may have a small scar to remind me - not to stay away from my hot water bottle but just to be more careful filling it.

But at least I'm not moderately wealthy.

Stuck in traffic out the back of Bridgeman Downs this afternoon, watched a bloke who looked like he'd just parked his horse after the Quorn trundle his wheelie bins down a good kilometre of driveway from his mansion to the kerb : )

Oh, come on.

Why is it that the more gently you try to put something to bed the more likely it is that your hot water bottle will explode all over it?

Good idea of mine, this being chums. (And become my live-in...chum.) Nearly all the fun of the fair without all that tedious timetabling of phone calls so as not to appear desperate / overly keen / remotely interested. After all, we were chums before, weren't we?

A quick recap for those of us who had to use the facilities:

1994: Sat next to you on the bus on the way to work.
1994 - 2002, for God's sake: Intermittent bursts of disgraceful fancying behaviour.
2003 - 2005: Thrice-yearly how the hell are you and happy birthday emails.
June 2005ish: Botched attempt at declaration of admiration.
Jan 2006: Finally, decisively disinterested. At last.
Nov 2006: Seduced out of the blue.
Dec 2006 - March 2007: Wide-scale confusion interspersed with glorious flashes of giddiness.
April 2007 - Never mind, we can still be friends.
May 2007: Oh. Getting the picture.
June 2007 - Best not to respond.

So why, why did you bother, you silly, twisted boy? That's 13 years of happy encounters to be written off in light of 2007, the Year of Crappy Timing
(ie yours), and your bloody fingerprints are all over this city. I can't go anywhere without meeting a ghost.

Who the hell is going to quote Kenny Everett to me now?

With apologies to my mother.

When I was in primary school my mum was my biggest source of shame. As far as I was concerned she wasn't a proper mother. As far as I was concerned you should not be able to pick your mother from the family assorted selection ranged along the front fence of the school at 3:00pm. You should not be able to see your mother from space.

Proper mothers, I would have told you if you'd asked me, should have long, flowing hair in one of the acceptable artificial colours (ash, autumn, savannah sunrise), long, flowing skirts in a feminine floral design, lipstick colour-coordinated with their high heels, high heels colour-coordinated with their handbags and a keyring displaying the logo of their secondhand (Dad, of course, gets the new car) but well-maintained hatchback dangling from their manicured fingernails.

I could almost have forgiven Mum for having to walk us home had she not had short, brown hair, covered in winter by a red woolly hat, a backpack, absolutely no makeup (not even plucked eyebrows, for God's sake) Masseur sandals and a purple and red jumper with blue corduroy trousers with an apple patch on the knee. Who told me I was naked? I don't know, but they should have had a look at Mum before they had a go at me. All I wanted was to be collected by somebody who fitted in. I spent the next five years at my friend's house trying to get her mum to braid my hair and teach me how to shave my legs.

Saturday afternoon at my parents' place the door opened to reveal a woman in green, brown and cream striped corduroy trousers, brown boots with one grey and one hot pink sock poking out of the tops of them and a khaki jacket. No make-up, of course, and no earrings either, with hair that hadn't so much been dragged through a bush as put through a mulcher. I had to be shown in a mirror that one side of it had collapsed, the time between traffic light changes not being what it once was. My mother, of course, looked gorgeous - just a hint of blush and lipstick and a very smart suede jacket...and heels. Some people know when it's worth making an effort.

My mother will live to shove me around in my Zimmerframe because she started walking before it became fashionable to walk and get nowhere. The patch on the trousers took me overseas for the first time and bought me a clarinet. She's never had to unclog her pores because she never jammed them up with grout in the first place. She once grew her hair and looked like a drowning sheepdog. Just like I look with long hair, in fact.

Some of us, one in particular, are happy not to give a toss what anyone else thinks; and some of us, me in particular, know that all the things I ran away from are actually all the reasons she's fantastic.

I mean, honestly.

It's not even your car. It's your brother's car parked at the shopping centre. It's your brother's car driving the other way on the bridge (as the pelicans melting into the streetlights present me with their bottoms). It's your brother's car following me home. Forget for a second that despite it being etched on my retina a while back I now can't remember the registration number. Forget also that I'm not absolutely sure of the colour. Forget for dessert that your brother wouldn't know my car if he were served it on a sandwich. That he wouldn't know me if I were served to him on a sandwich.
I mean, really, it's been a couple of months. I'm down to feeling vaguely wistful about the whole experience. Tailing me on your behalf - is this the pathetic extent of my imagination?