fracture

Waking up on Sunday morning I was groggily re-assembling the previous night’s events in my mind’s eye. Sad to say that once again I’d let myself down. If there's one lesson life has taught me, one that I've learned through bitter experience, it is this:

My mum is always right.



"£50? That’s far too much to spend on a pair of sunglasses. They'll only get lost, or someone will sit on them and break them!"

Well, in a way we were both right. I was right in that they are, without doubt, the world's coolest pair of sunglasses and therefore worth every penny. She was right in that on Saturday, at the fabulous Art Bar Art Fair, I drank a skinfull and broke them. It's nothing that can't be fixed. An arm snapped off at the hinge, damage that a simple dab of glue should surely fix. So that’s the glasses, and my mind is at rest.

There’s another piece of advice my mum likes to give whenever I’m recounting drunken misadventures, and it is this:

“Don’t have too much to drink!”

Over the course of a beautiful Saturday afternoon I accept that I drank far too much beer and ate hardly anything all day. Of course I got rapidly the worse for wear, and was eventually bundled into a taxi with the driver being told my address. But the silly driver couldn’t find the house, and I just said, “Leave it mate, I’ll find my own way back.”

So it was that I was apprehended by the police wandering the streets of Wormit, who kindly dropped me off home and advised my flatmates, “He seems to be in a confused state of mind.” All this I learned of only in retrospect.

The morning arrives, and I’m determined to go to work. I’m awake in plenty of time, but there’s a problem; my left hand hurts like hell. It’s swollen up like a balloon, and the smallest movement brings with it a sharp twinge of pain. Despite all this I go to work for a 12pm start. I’m sat at my desk with this comedy cartoon purple inflatable hand causing me extreme discomfort. I receive an email from someone else in the office: “u have broke ur hand mate”. Looked at in the cold light of day he would appear to have a good point. I call NHS 24 and describe the symptoms, and their advice is fairly unequivocal: get down to A & E, and buy some painkillers because they’ll probably want a good prod at it.

I go to A & E, amusing the taxi driver with tales of broken sunglasses and my broken hand. “It’s karma mate, the glasses must be getting their own back,” he said. In hospital I get x-rayed, my hand is broken and I’m given a sling to wear. Once that’s sorted out it’s time to head back to the Art Bar for the conclusion of the Art Fair, and cue much mockery for my foolishness, all of it richly reserved.



So where does that leave me and my poor bruised bloated hand? It was back to the hospital today for some more scans, and the pot’s come off to be replaced by a splint which should keep everything in place while the bone heals up. Now I’m sat watching the football having phoned in sick, thinking that every cloud does at least have a silver lining.