The Strangest Autumn Ever...
Supposing I tried to write this post in the vein of an established genre?
Try for example, Hammer House of Horror. Lightning flashes, a red overlay floods across the outline of trees, and we hear the voice of Vincent Price speaking in his silken dry tones...
"It was, it seemed, just another autumn..."
No, too bloody. Autumn is golden orange and russet shades. Let's try a musical style, perhaps Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. Da-da-dah-dah da-dah, and in comes Richard Burton's spitfire-flying narrative style "No-one would have believed, as the summer faded quietly into Autumn, that we were being watched..."
No, too paranoid. Nobody's watching us, we're not some intergalactic soap-opera. Try something lighter. Derek and Clive.
"The strangest autumn ever, was when that stripper was staying at the club and used to do that trick opening a bottle of wine with her fanny. Every now and then, it would go slightly wrong, and she'd lose the cork. Me being an emergency plumber, like, I had to go down there and sort of get it out for her."
"Like you do."
No, that won't do either. There might be children reading these blogs. Actually, that's very unlikely, most children have far better things to do. There might be adults with the mental age of children reading this blog. Yes, that's a possibility, and I wouldn't want them to get ideas and throw away their corkscrews. They might hit someone as they spiraled out of the window. The corkscrews, I mean. Although I wouldn't put it past a stupid person to get anything wrong these days. Put out the rubbish, and then put out the rubbish.
I'll just have to tell it like it is, then. I'm seeing things from the perspective of a worm, or a mole, or at least, from a kneeling perspective, weeding out a couple of the top flowerbeds for a customer. I should have been digging out the lower beds with a fork and turning over the earth, but at lunchtime, wandering around a garden centre trying to get a sensible price for black weed-control cloth, I had a sudden searing pain in my right shoulder. I knew what it was, I'd had it before. Frozen shoulder, one of the great mysteries of modern life. I hadn't had it for several years, but once you've been touched by it you never forget it. I just couldn't understand why on that particular autumn lunchtime I should have been struck again.
Frozen shoulder feels much worse than it actually is, and the doctors can do very little to cure it, apart from massive cortisone injections into the shoulder, which I know for certain would bring on my infamous vagus nerve reaction. The best advice I had received in the past was to try and do something rather than immobilise the affected arm. So I opted for the easy money that afternoon. I was pulling out low ground-cover weeds amongst the Cyclamen just coming into bloom, and cutting down the Raspberry canes now that they had finished their crop. Or had they? I spotted half a dozen fresh berries on one cane, and lower down, fresh leaves sprouting from the base of several other plants. In amongst the Evening Primrose and Phlocks, I found Forget-me-nots still flowering, and underneath a small tree, two small blue flowers on a fresh stem of Honesty. Some of the plants just didn't know when to give up.
I knew when to stop, though. My shoulder, despite my taking things easy and working left-handed, was burning as though hot barbecue skewers had been driven into it. I drove home using my left hand and waited for it to ease. I went to bed and hoped that sleep would come and take me away from it all, but two competing sets of pain set in; if I eased the shoulder, a fierce pain developed in my elbow. If I moved the elbow to alleviate the ache, the shoulder flared up again. I tried a couple of Ibuprofen, and within twenty minutes had chilly feet and chattering teeth. Was it so cold that I was getting hypothermia? The symptoms seemed to match. A bowl of porridge, a hot bath, and half an hour huddled by the gas heater got me back into a more normal state, and I was able to go back to bed for a second attempt.
Thinking back, I had often had previous attacks of frozen shoulder in the autumn, when the cold and damp arrives. I have an old injury to that shoulder where, as a teenager on a motorbike with less brains than the Greaves Silverstone I was riding, I crashed on a bend and fractured the top of my arm where the two bones meet and form the socket for the shoulder. Although it healed quickly enough, I had several times since over-reached and momentarily dislocated the joint, and the autumn knew how to find a weak spot. Perhaps the unexpected double-blossoms I had seen that afternoon meant that this was a particularly potent autumn, one that we shall remember for many years to come.
The tabby cat came to lay on the duvet close to me. Cats seem to know when you're poorly, and think that climbing on top of you and kneading your chest or stomach with their paws while purring loudly will help. In a way, she does help. Overweight, as many spayed female tabbies are renowned for being, she has got me out of a tricky situation several times, when after having said "Stop pushing me out of bed, you fat bitch", I've been able to answer the "What did you call me?" with "I was talking to the cat."
Try for example, Hammer House of Horror. Lightning flashes, a red overlay floods across the outline of trees, and we hear the voice of Vincent Price speaking in his silken dry tones...
"It was, it seemed, just another autumn..."
No, too bloody. Autumn is golden orange and russet shades. Let's try a musical style, perhaps Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. Da-da-dah-dah da-dah, and in comes Richard Burton's spitfire-flying narrative style "No-one would have believed, as the summer faded quietly into Autumn, that we were being watched..."
No, too paranoid. Nobody's watching us, we're not some intergalactic soap-opera. Try something lighter. Derek and Clive.
"The strangest autumn ever, was when that stripper was staying at the club and used to do that trick opening a bottle of wine with her fanny. Every now and then, it would go slightly wrong, and she'd lose the cork. Me being an emergency plumber, like, I had to go down there and sort of get it out for her."
"Like you do."
No, that won't do either. There might be children reading these blogs. Actually, that's very unlikely, most children have far better things to do. There might be adults with the mental age of children reading this blog. Yes, that's a possibility, and I wouldn't want them to get ideas and throw away their corkscrews. They might hit someone as they spiraled out of the window. The corkscrews, I mean. Although I wouldn't put it past a stupid person to get anything wrong these days. Put out the rubbish, and then put out the rubbish.
I'll just have to tell it like it is, then. I'm seeing things from the perspective of a worm, or a mole, or at least, from a kneeling perspective, weeding out a couple of the top flowerbeds for a customer. I should have been digging out the lower beds with a fork and turning over the earth, but at lunchtime, wandering around a garden centre trying to get a sensible price for black weed-control cloth, I had a sudden searing pain in my right shoulder. I knew what it was, I'd had it before. Frozen shoulder, one of the great mysteries of modern life. I hadn't had it for several years, but once you've been touched by it you never forget it. I just couldn't understand why on that particular autumn lunchtime I should have been struck again.
Frozen shoulder feels much worse than it actually is, and the doctors can do very little to cure it, apart from massive cortisone injections into the shoulder, which I know for certain would bring on my infamous vagus nerve reaction. The best advice I had received in the past was to try and do something rather than immobilise the affected arm. So I opted for the easy money that afternoon. I was pulling out low ground-cover weeds amongst the Cyclamen just coming into bloom, and cutting down the Raspberry canes now that they had finished their crop. Or had they? I spotted half a dozen fresh berries on one cane, and lower down, fresh leaves sprouting from the base of several other plants. In amongst the Evening Primrose and Phlocks, I found Forget-me-nots still flowering, and underneath a small tree, two small blue flowers on a fresh stem of Honesty. Some of the plants just didn't know when to give up.
I knew when to stop, though. My shoulder, despite my taking things easy and working left-handed, was burning as though hot barbecue skewers had been driven into it. I drove home using my left hand and waited for it to ease. I went to bed and hoped that sleep would come and take me away from it all, but two competing sets of pain set in; if I eased the shoulder, a fierce pain developed in my elbow. If I moved the elbow to alleviate the ache, the shoulder flared up again. I tried a couple of Ibuprofen, and within twenty minutes had chilly feet and chattering teeth. Was it so cold that I was getting hypothermia? The symptoms seemed to match. A bowl of porridge, a hot bath, and half an hour huddled by the gas heater got me back into a more normal state, and I was able to go back to bed for a second attempt.
Thinking back, I had often had previous attacks of frozen shoulder in the autumn, when the cold and damp arrives. I have an old injury to that shoulder where, as a teenager on a motorbike with less brains than the Greaves Silverstone I was riding, I crashed on a bend and fractured the top of my arm where the two bones meet and form the socket for the shoulder. Although it healed quickly enough, I had several times since over-reached and momentarily dislocated the joint, and the autumn knew how to find a weak spot. Perhaps the unexpected double-blossoms I had seen that afternoon meant that this was a particularly potent autumn, one that we shall remember for many years to come.
The tabby cat came to lay on the duvet close to me. Cats seem to know when you're poorly, and think that climbing on top of you and kneading your chest or stomach with their paws while purring loudly will help. In a way, she does help. Overweight, as many spayed female tabbies are renowned for being, she has got me out of a tricky situation several times, when after having said "Stop pushing me out of bed, you fat bitch", I've been able to answer the "What did you call me?" with "I was talking to the cat."
posted by Sopwith-Camel | 7:01 pm
2 Comments:
I wish you'd explain yourself properly. I've gotta go all the way downstairs now to get my corkscrew back.
Anyhow, what I was going to say was, we bought some of that weed control cloth only last week. I never even knew the stuff existed till a couple of weeks ago though. Tell me, if we have a lot left over, would it be possible to make the remainder up into a pair of cycling shorts or other practical garment?
Hi C&S, I think you might be expecting too much from from weed-control cycling shorts, they won't conceal bushes, you know.
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