Fall again. Fall better.

It was fellow-blogger Rog who pointed out, ages ago when for some reason I had touched on the subject, that once you pass seventy you don’t ‘fall over’ any more, you ‘have a fall’.  Well, judging from how I felt on waking up last Monday morning, I reckon I must have done both on my way to bed the night before.

I don’t want to go into details, even those I can remember.  Suffice to say that whilst I was failing to tidy the kitchen, the builders had been in and repositioned the staircase.  And I turned the landing light off instead of on, easy mistake.  And it was very late.  And …

It’s a cracked rib.  Been there, done that (you can’t wear a T-shirt under these conditions), so I knew what lay ahead.  The doctor was very sympathetic once I’d spun him my carefully concocted yarn about getting out of the bath, and gave me a truckload of codeine phosphate tablets.  They’re 15mg, and I’m allowed up to four at a time, up to four times a day, so I have plenty of dosage flexibility.

 

One of the instructions on the leaflet is ‘DO NOT drink alcohol with codeine phosphate, as it may affect you more than usual.’  I considered and rejected a couple of smart-ass sophistries – does that just mean don’t wash them down with wine? and can’t I just drink less than usual? – and have been experimenting with de-alcoholized wine, which is wine that’s been made the proper way then had nearly all the alcohol taken out.  I can report that it’s not (quite) as unpalatable as you might think.  The shiraz I’ve tried tastes almost like a cheap, rather sweet shiraz; and the wuzziness caused by the codeine neatly compensates (nearly) for the missing alcohol.  You can get used to anything.

The list of possible side effects is awesome – twenty of them in all.  If I’d had them all, there wouldn’t have been much of me left.  As a quibble, number 19 on the list should really have been number one.  (I’ll let you guess for yourselves what it is.  The clue is there.)  The most interesting one, though, is number 17: ‘Hallucinations’.  Sadly, I don’t think this has happened, though you can’t be sure, can you?  

Geminids



The next few nights are going to be a perfect opportunity to see this spectacular cosmic lightshow, apparently, because it's a new moon, and clear skies are likely.   I'll be out there looking, wrapped up warm, cricking my neck and trying not to fall over backwards.  And maybe mouthing a wish or two.

 

 

 

 

By the way, I've always wondered why meteorites, which sound small, are the big ones, whilst meteors, which sound big, are the little shooting stars.  It seems the wrong way round.

 

 

Falling

No, not that!  Not even this from 1958.  This is about the real thing.  I was sidetracked the other day, by an itchy thumb, to write at more length than I’d intended about the only tumble, thus far, that has left a detectable trace (at least on the outside of me – I have no way of knowing about the mental consequences of being dropped on my head all those times before I was three).  But there have been others, so here are just a few.

For years, we went to south Pembrokeshire for our summer holidays.  Our rented house was just up the hill from Wiseman’s Bridge beach, and it was always my secret ambition to be first down there and up to the top of the Big Rock.  This particular year, I was probably eight, I ran too fast down the road and swerved to avoid an approaching car.  Unthinkable today, of course, but cars were few and far between then.  I went over forwards and removed much of the skin from my right knee.  Why is this memorable?  Because I still remember, as if I were hearing it, my instant thought: “I’m not going to cry!”  And I didn’t.

Fast forward to 1967, Milan.  We have somehow fallen in with a patroness who collects artistic butterflies on Friday evenings in her huge apartment.  She has an invisible husband and an all too visible daughter.  I am forced to play a duet with someone who claims to be Django Reinhardt’s son, and might well be.  We leave as the sun is rising, and decide it’d be fun to see if we can jump between a number of raised traffic islands, spaced about two metres apart.  I can, twice: but not three times.  This time, it’s my left cheek.  I tell a lie to my girlfriend about slipping on a dropped ice cream.  She asks me what flavour it was.

You know those ‘director chairs’, the sort of rectangular ones which have ‘Michael Winner’ or something written on the back?  Well, there’s a subspecies in which the backrest is on pivots, so that you can lean comfortably back into it whilst watching the rushes or whatever it is directors do.  Do not, under any circumstances, reach out to one of these to steady yourself when stumbling on an uneven garden path after consuming three blue cocktails.  In fact, do not under any circumstances ever consume a blue cocktail.  Cracked rib that time.

I could go on.  The time my foot missed the skid mat in the shower in a hotel room as I attempted to turn it down from scalding; the time I unwisely accepted, and smoked, an unaccustomed cigarette and then tried to walk up a steep grassy slope in the dark; the time when I lost my dancing balance and narrowly avoided landing on top of a sleeping small child on a sofa …  but I think I have delighted you enough.  We all fall once in a while.