The Art of Slow

Rush hour in central Tokyo: Fast.

Winston Churchill was once described (possibly by himself) as “a young man in a hurry”.  Obsessed by his own mortality (his father and grandfather both died relatively young) he was convinced he would not live far beyond his thirties and set out to achieve as much as he could before then. 

I can sympathise.  I did not meet the love of my life until I was almost thirty, and I didn’t fully embrace climbing – something that has since become an obsession – until shortly after that. I sometimes think about what I really achieved between the ages of, say, 22 and 28.  The answer is, of course, quite a lot – graduating (from both university and law school), moving to London, qualifying as a solicitor, investing a huge amount of time in my career as a city lawyer.  I spent time with friends, I spent a fair amount of money, I ate a lot and drank a lot more.  But I sometimes feel like a lot of that time was just a bit superficial. Throughout my twenties I worked hard at a good law firm with great people. I progressed through the ranks and, I think, was appreciated and valued. Yet I was working long and, often, stressful hours in a job that ultimately did not inspire me. I ran a marathon, but also spent a huge amount of time in an underground gym running on a treadmill in front of MTV.  I also spent five years in a relationship that started out well, but in time brought a lot of frustration and unhappiness (to both parties). So ever since then, I’ve found myself in a bit of a hurry. When I think about all I want to do in life, I feel, sometimes overwhelmingly, that I don’t have enough time; that I am living life in a rush. Now, however, my broken leg (or, as I have taken to calling it in the middle of the night, my stupid leg) has led me to a startling discovery: there can be pleasure in life in slow motion.

Until a couple of weeks ago my life was full of instant gratification: instant communication on my blackberry, 25 minutes to whiz to work on my bike; two minutes in Café Nero picking up my morning Cappuccino; early morning sessions at the climbing wall (15 minute warm up, 40 minutes climbing, 10 minute stretch, 5 minute cup of tea).  Now, I am forced to take my time – over everything.  It takes half an hour to get the blood moving in my leg so I can get out of bed in the morning without pain.  A further half an hour to wash myself (including periodic rest stops perched on the edge of the bath). Ten minutes to climb up and down the stairs each time I need to visit the loo.  Half an hour spent hobbling the 400 yards to the corner of my road and back for a morning coffee.  I recently saw an advert in my local butcher for the “Slow Food” movement – a plea for a return to slow grown, slow reared, seasonal produce.  Well I am now the sole member of my very own “Slow Life” movement, and it actually isn’t that bad. I know people look on sympathetically at the time it takes me to do anything. But I now think, what’s not to like about taking things slowly? If nothing else, it fills the day - there’s only so much day-time telly I can take.  And if taking things slowly helps the next six weeks to pass, so I can get off these crutches and back up to full speed, then I’m all for it.

Reflections. Or, Five Things I have Learned.

Reflecting on what's just passed - Rocky Mountains, Colorado.

Anita tells me that when she informed my mum I had accidentally thrown myself and my five week old child down the stairs, suffering a broken leg in the process, my mum said “Well, he certainly doesn’t make things easy for himself.”  On reflection I agree that simply walking down the stairs, rather than leaping from the top and surfing down on my side whilst holding a small child in the air, would have been easier, and undoubtedly a lot less painful. But I will give my mum the benefit of the doubt and assume (as is no doubt the case) that her comments can be attributed to shock/concern/the knowledge that I am, essentially, clumsy. Could I have done anything differently? I don’t think so. I wasn’t rushing, I wasn’t carrying more than I could manage, I wasn’t, for once, daydreaming. I was in fact walking down the stairs thinking, as I have done every time I have walked down the same stairs with Lara in my arms, “I mustn’t slip on these stairs”.

I’m not sure much can be learned from the fall itself, although I now realise that there are many things I have learned, and will continue to learn, from the consequences.  So here are, in no particular order, five things I have learned since I wrecked me leg.

1. The only certainty is that there are no certainties.

A bit of an obvious one, this one, but I am no less surprised how often this lesson presents itself for the learning.  At 8.10am on 13 April I was preparing to leave the house with my family for a trip to Hampshire.  That very morning Anita and I had been thinking about all the exciting things we would do with the forthcoming batch of long bank holiday weekends.  By 8.11am I was lying in a heap at the bottom of my stairs feeling like my leg was on fire.  Through the pain I could hear Anita, panic audible in her voice, telling the 999 operator that I’d dropped my five week old child down the stairs and thought I’d broken my leg. By 9.30am I was in hospital, had been x-rayed, and told I was going to be out of climbing action for twelve months. What a difference an hour and twenty minutes make. Still, things could be worse. Which brings me on to…

2. Things can always be worse.

Lara is fine, I have almost certainly escaped surgery on my leg, and I am fortunate to have a wife who is currently at home on maternity leave / 24 hour invalid care.  I have unexpected time on my hands to spend with Lara (even if I am not actually capable of doing much). There are many, many people less well off than me. Only a couple of years ago an otherwise fit and healthy cousin of Anita’s had to unexpectedly undergo major open heart surgery. In September of last year double Olympic gold medal rower James Cracknell was cycling across the USA when he was hit on the back of the head by the wing mirror of an oil tanker which passed him at 70 miles per hour, leaving him with long term brain injuries Last week I shared a hospital ward with a number of men all of whom were in worse shape than I am.  I could go on, but there’s no need.  The pessimist says “things can’t get any worse!” The optimist replies: “don’t be so negative, things can get a lot worse!”. Or is it the other way round? Whatever. Things can always be worse.

3. You can’t beat friends and family.

I have been overwhelmed by the number of emails, facebook messages, texts and calls of support I have received from friends and family since knacking my leg.  And I’m not even that badly injured – more just stricken down with self pity really. Of course, I have also received a significant number of messages commenting on my inability to climb a set of stairs, never mind mountains. But on the whole, it has not ceased to amaze me how lucky Anita and I are to have so many amazing friends and family both here in London and further afield.  In the last week I have variously been given: a home made get-well card from my 3 year old niece; a freezer full of posh food; series two of the Wire; various different varieties of extra strong painkillers; Lady Chatterly’s Lover on DVD (saving that one for when things get really bleak); a pineapple; and a huge amount of love, support and sympathy. I think I might cry. Seriously.

4. The English weather is a fickle beast

To be fair, I’ve known this for a while, but the last week has reminded me just how fickle the weather really can be.  The last time we had a period of good weather (which seems about four years ago now but I think was last May), a friend emailed to ask “Where do all the attractive girls go when the sun isn’t shining?”. A very good question.  But what I really want to know is why is the weather only good when I can’t take advantage of it?

So far this year I have spent more weekdays than I care to remember sitting in my office looking out over a sun drenched city and wishing I was outside.  By contrast I have spent more than one weekend shivering in a damp and blustery peak district, huddled in an alpine-weight down jacket and desperately blowing on my hands to warm them up in enough to hold onto the next bit of rock. Now I sit on the sofa, as April steadily unfolds into what looks likely to be the warmest ever. And probably May, and probably June too. All I want to do is go outside and run around.  Where’s the justice?!

5. Anarchy is not ok.

The word Anarchy conjures images of lawlessness, countries without government, Eton schoolboys smashing a Macdonalds window in central London. In fact, Anarchy, from the greek ‘anarchia’ simply means ‘without ruler’ – arguably the most direct form of democracy: a complete absence of rules.  I once spent a frustrating afternoon with a climbing guide called Dean in the mountains of catalunya arguing about whether anarchy could ever work in practice.  He, as a mild mannered anarchist (I could never really imagine Dean smashing up a Macdonalds, but you never know) maintained that it could.  I argued that if we both lived in a village, and I stole his pig, then one needed a body of rules to establish that stealing the pig was wrong, and to deal with the consequences.  He countered by explaining that since there were no rules against pig stealing, then it wasn’t actually possible for me to steal his pig. Logically, he was right, but I could see how our village life could quickly descend into a downward spiral of pig stealing, lawlessness, and, well, anarchy.  Life requires rules. 


Upon leaving hospital I was signed off work for six weeks. On Friday I got home, sat on the sofa and pondered the 42 days of daytime television, tea and chocolate digestives stretching before me.  I very quickly realised that what I needed in my new rule-free care-free invalid life was some rules.  So: I would rise at 8am every morning, do my rehab exercises, wash, and go downstairs for breakfast.  I would allow myself no television during normal office hours (well, 9.30 to 5.30 at least).  And I would leave the flat once a day, if only to get some coffee and fresh air.  These rules would give me structure and purpose.

The next morning I ate breakfast in bed.  I hobbled into the bathroom and nearly passed out from the pain of the blood rushing down into the injured bit of my leg. I binned the exercises, and instead hobbled downstairs to watch - at 8.30am - my first episode of The Wire.  At lunchtime I even watched Neighbours.  Leaving the flat seemed like a hassle, so I didn’t bother.  I do need rules. But they can wait until tomorrow.

Comedy value a.k.a. doing it for the kids

My feet, in happier times. Cordillera Blanca, Peru.

Back in the nineteen nineties I bought a copy of Joe Simpson’s book “Touching the Void”.  It was the second mountaineering book I ever bought. I am also not ashamed to say it was the first, and is the only, book that has ever made me cry.  I have read it many time since, and it still makes me cry.  Climber shatters his knee and lower leg near the summit of a remote Peruvian mountain; gets lowered most of the way down by his partner; partner cuts rope to save them both from dying; climber falls 150 feet into a crevasse, then spends four days crawling back to camp with no food, water, or medication.  Legend! 

I’ve often wondered what kind of sick or injured person I would be – whether I was stricken with Cancer Lance Armstrong-style, rendered paraplegic, or suffered some other fundamentally life altering injury.  Would I retreat into depression and self pity, or would I embrace life and all its opportunities, altered as they necessarily would be?  Thankfully I am pretty far from finding out, although the limited experience I have to date suggests I’d be somewhere short of the Simpson-Armstrong axis. 

On the second night home from hospital I awoke with what felt like unbearable pain in my leg, which would not go away even after munching more than the recommended dose of paracetamol and codeine. Anita was, as ever, both supportive and sensible. “You’ve been great so far, and its natural that at some point you are going to get fed up.”  “I’m fed up already, and its only been two days” I replied in a pitiful (and, I now know, overly dramatic way).  Shortly afterwards I fell asleep and woke up the next morning feeling rightly embarrassed about the night’s events.  As the surgeon told me when I sought reassurance about my long term climbing prospects, “On the scale of one to horrific, your injury is at the easy end.”  I’m not sure that’s a precise medical scale, but she was absolutely right.  Indeed, she later put it a different (and perhaps more accurate way): “this is more an irritation than a life changing injury”.

And she is right. Because in a matter of months I will (touch wood) have two fully functioning legs again. It’s a cliché, but there are many people much worse off than me.  It is said that clichés are usually true (itself a cliché), but in this case I know it for myself having spent two nights in hospital last week: I shared a ward with a motorcycle crash victim on the verge of having one leg amputated, a cyclist who had just had one leg amputated following a traffic accident, and a well-spoken elderly gentleman who was, essentially, dying.  So, one lesson learned already (I have several, which will be a separate post entirely – the anticipation!).

But back to where I started. I am, for the reasons above, neither in the realm of self-pity, nor heroic sporting fight-backs.  I am just a bloke who, like hundreds of others, has broken his leg and now has to spend a bit of time at home watching daytime telly. So where does that leave me?  I have always thought that there is comedy value in almost everything (children, priests (although not necessarily together), Swindon, Arsenal goalkeeping and Vince Cable to name a few) and minor leg injuries are no exception.  Take the following examples (which may or may not be funny – they seem funny to me, but I am essentially out of my mash on codeine most of the time):

On Saturday my sister brought my niece, Emily (aged 3) to see me. Emily rushed in with a huge grin, then stopped, pointed to my leg with a look of concern on her face, turned to my sister and said “Uncle Bay-vits has got a sore leg.”  She confirmed her diagnosis by noting that I was wearing a “plastic” on my leg. She can’t yet pronounce “Uncle David” or “Plaster cast”. I’m sure it will come.

Then, my American sister-in-law, Carrie, told me on facebook that her two and a half year old son Ethan (already a basketball prodigy and possibly well on his way to being a medical prodigy) was particularly interested in my injury: “Ethan read a book about a mouse with a broken leg and now is so excited that you’ve broken your leg too. Although you are probably less so.”

As I said, I’m doing it for the kids. 

I've wrecked me leg!

Bugger.

When I was an A-Level student at Priestly Sixth Form and Community College, I played second trumpet in the orchestra for the college’s annual theatre production.  In 1996 it was West Side Story.  During one fight scene rehearsal, a member of the cast, known only as the “scouse mouse” (on account of her being small, and from Liverpool), fell awkwardly and twisted her ankle. “I’ve wrecked me leg!” she shrieked.  From then on, those four words became the rallying cry every time I, or one of my friends, stubbed a toe, bruised a knee, or suffered some other minor leg-related mishap.  Luckily enough, I have never actually “wrecked me leg” in anger. Until now.

Last Wednesday I suffered a spiral fracture of the lower left Tibia and Fibula.  In other words I wrecked – well, broke, to be precise – me leg. I have always thought that if I was going to wreck me leg for real, it would be in some sort of heroic skiing or climbing escapade. Not quite Joe-Simpson levels of trauma, obviously, but something sufficient to merit a decent story and befitting my (imagined) status as a (wannabe) badass.  Sadly it was not to be. My injury resulted from a fall down my own stairs, five week old baby Lara in my arms, as I got ready to attend a funeral.  Thankfully Lara was completely unharmed, but as a result of protecting her, and not putting my hands out to break the fall, I nailed myself instead.  As my friend Hugh put it, in a way that only he can, I “took a bullet for Team Phillips”. Quite dramatic, that, but I like it.  Another friend, James Pierce, put it a different way. He simply said “D*ckhead”.

So, my career as a rad dad – jogging with the baby stroller, dead hangs from my finger board with a babybjorn in place of a weight belt, afternoons down the climbing wall with Lara in tow – has been cruelly cut short, before it even really got started.  The surgeon tells me that she is hoping not to have to operate, but that I am looking at four months in plaster, the first two of which will involve a full leg cast.  Climbing and skiing are, apparently, off the agenda for a year.  My daily routine involves a lot of sitting on the sofa, leg propped up on a pile of cushions.  I feel like I am wearing a particularly tight fitting thigh-high ski boot that I want to take off after a day on the slopes, but can’t. The throbbing is relentless and going any further than the bathroom seems like a serious undertaking.  I am almost certainly addicted to codeine.

At least I will now have the time to write a blog, something I have thought about for a while but never actually done. I have always thought that blogging is only for the sort of people who have something interesting to say.  There is a significant chance that this blog will prove that theory correct.  But as Malcolm Gladwell says, anything can be interesting if you think about it for long enough. So if you are still reading, thanks. More musings to come.