Twice-bitten

I don't believe in coincidences. I don't mean by that that I deny them completely; but I don't believe it is pure chance and there is no other connection between apparently un-connected events. Equally, I don't go to the absurd extremes that some will do in order to try and prove that J F Kennedy was assassinated by the entire Jackson Five plus close family in order to try and cover up an early peccadillo of Michael's in the pre-natal ward before he was even born.

But anyway, this all began with a pain in the legs. I had been up for a while, cooked breakfast, eaten it, (of course), and was mooching around when I suddenly realised that my legs, just above the knees, were in excruciating pain. Funny, I thought to myself, I had leg pains like this sometime last year, didn't I? And I cured them by going out for a gentle bicycle ride and pissing off Little Petal completely because she had predicted dire consequences for me if I did go out that door, and didn't I come back in with a smug grin on my face?

So I looked up leg cramps in the diary, which, because it's on a wiki on my web-server, is as easy as googling the web, And that's when the first frightening coincidence cropped up. The date on which I had first written about my leg-pains last year was the very same day of the very same month of this year. How improbable is that?

But it got worse. I re-read that page from the diary a year ago, and the first thing that was on it was a description of a dream I had had, where I was driving a narrow-gauge railway train. That is quite an unusual dream for me, because although I frequently dream of railways, the dreams are always of either full-size or model railways, To distinctly see a narrow-gauge train is a very rare occurrence. And that was coincidence number two, because that very morning, before I had suddenly said "JFC, my legs are effing killing me", I had written in my diary that I had dreamt of a miniature railway, the kind that you can sit in but not side-by-side. So, not a normal dream for me.

And then I thought to look around the days immediately before each occurrence of leg-pains, and if I thought it was already bad, just how incredible do you think it then got? Let's just say discombobulatingly amazing.

Three days before each occurrence of the leg pains and the dreams of unusual railways, I had bought from the market in town a bag of sea-samphire. If you think that that isn't much of a coincidence, let me just say that last year, I had only bought and eaten sea-samphire once during the whole year, and I've already told you when that was. And, I'm sure the quicker ones of you are already thinking, yes, I had only bought sea-samphire once this year as well, and even the dimmest reader should know by now when that day was...

And was there more? Well, yes, because each time just before the day of the leg-pains, I had drunk a whole bottle of wine to celebrate Little Petal's birthday. I know, her having a birthday each year on the very same day isn't a coincidence, but I hadn't drunk anything of significance for weeks either side, except for shortly after buying and eating a two-pound bag of sea-samphire, then dreaming about unusual railways shortly before suffering excruciating pains in my mid-to-upper thighs, and as far as I could see, that made the whole affair bloody damn fishy, too fishy for words.

But anyway, the important thing, to me anyway, was not this pluponderance of improbable occurrences, but the fact that I had, in writing, an apparent cure for the pains, which was all I really wanted to get rid of, the coincidences I can live with. And so I hobbled outside and dragged the bike out onto the road, and managed to lift a leg over the crossbar and off I went, riding gently along the self-same well-documented road to recovery I had pioneered a year ago, expecting the miracle to occur.

But it bloody well didn't, did it? (Dinnit?) I only got as far as the end of the first road when I knew that my legs were absolutely not going to get better doing this. In fact, I realised, as I tried to turn round in a tight circle and ride back home, my legs had suddenly got an awful lot worse, and I had to stop pedaling. And that meant that I was going to have to walk home, because Little Petal was miles away at work. And that's when I discovered the full horror of whatever it was that I had got wrong with my legs, I couldn't even walk. I could stand up, immobile, holding the bicycle, for as long as I wanted to, but if I tried to lift either leg a fraction of an inch to move it forwards, burning fires suddenly erupted just above whichever knee it was that I was trying to move, and if I did force myself to endure the pain and move the leg forwards, burning pains would then erupt in the mid-thigh muscles of the same leg. I was stuck, four hundred yards from home, doomed to stand there holding my bicycle like a piece of modern sculpture; painful, ugly and futile.

I solved the problem of "how do I get out of this one, then?" when I found that I could stretch a leg out behind me without a twinge, and I was soon walking backwards along the road, wheeling the bike, (pointing forwards, I know the traffic rules), beside me. And then I heard a car approach, and slow down, and stop, and I saw that it was someone I knew, so that I couldn't ignore them or pretend I was from Lithuania looking for work, and I had to listen to them say "And just what the blue bollocking hell do you think you're doing?"

And I tried saying "Look, I don't want to talk about it, OK?", but they selected reverse and drove backwards in company with me and leaned out of the window and said, "Fine, I'll just wait around until you do decide you want to get it off your chest," and so I had to tell them. And. knowing that they've now gone down the pub to monopolise the bar with yet another "Guess what the mad bastard from the station's done now" story, I suppose I can't bury it any deeper at all, and, based on the maxim that the best place to hide something is in plain view, I'm sticking it here for you all to see and ignore.

And, just let me warn you, anybody popping up with some asinine comment from a book on dreams on the significance of dreaming about narrow-gauge or miniature railways is going to get very short thrift. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a moron with a dream-interpretation book is a danger to society and needs to be put down at once.