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.