Rollin' and Tumblin'

There was so much I was going to do once I’d sent off ‘Fighting The Tide’; books and poetry to read, films to watch, some aimless pottering. Well, I’ve been good at the pottering but I’m beginning to feel quite rudderless without the project that has taken up a good part of the last eighteen months so I’m going to take Zinnia’s advice and try some short story writing whilst I plan the next book.

In the meantime my half-marathon preparation has suffered due to the last lap of FTT, trips to the south and flu. I’ve kept up some cross training and some swimming, thanks to the small hotel nearby, and after my swim I like to bliss out in the Jacuzzi. Alas, last Friday, as Purple Cooers will know, my Jacuzzi experience wasn’t quite so relaxing.

It was all going fine until I tried to get out and lost my footing. Seeing the world go into slow motion and a several hard edges approaching I reached out, grabbed a rail and ended up swinging into said hard surfaces with surprising force. When Tom wandered back to find out what was taking me so long he was surprised to find me huddled in the Jacuzzi surrounded by concerned swimmers. Once we’d establish that nothing was as quite as broken as it felt I tried to get out for a second time only to be greeted by cries of alarm from onlookers which, I can tell you, is not a good feeling. Thinking that perhaps I’d ripped my cossie I didn’t know whether to be relieved, when I glanced down, that my backside was not on view or aghast that my thigh looked as if it had been pounded with a meat tenderiser.

My sister, having been told the news by Ma, and scenting another whiff of me enjoying myself Far Too Much, rang up to tell me what a fitting end to my decadent life it would be if I had managed to finish myself off in a Jacuzzi. Nearly six years younger than me, her suspicion that I am a professional hedonist stems from a lifetime of watching me do all the things she wasn’t allowed to do. Trail blazing, I’d call it. Taking the flak so that, years later, she could slip beneath the parental radar unnoticed. Fanning the flames just a little bit, I told her that my accident was caused by an excess of champagne and the slippery grasp of a tubful of fit and baby-oiled young men. She almost believed me.

The damage so far stands at a purple bruise covering the entire underside of my left arm (yep, the bingo wing that came free with my frozen shoulder), a thoroughly tenderised left thigh and the biggest, blackest bruise I have ever seen all over my hip! I did initially wonder if it was possible to die of a bruise, a suggestion Tom was quick to dismiss with a comment that it was obvious I’d never played rugby. I had rather hoped that he might have had a few clues about my absence of a rugby playing past before now.

Oblivious to his purple wife, Tom is now in boat mode. This means that two days after my fall I was standing at the bottom of a 30-foot ladder whilst Tom fiddled with the top of the mast. Fortunately he managed to fix the problem without adding to anyone’s tally of bruises. ‘Better that it happens now and not in the middle of the Irish Sea,’ he tells me happily. The Irish Sea? Yep, that’s where we’re heading in June. And I thought dry land was risky…

Painting is ‘The Quartering Sea’ by Tomo Tomos,