My knee hurts. It’s been stiff and hurting a few days now and it’s no fun. No fun at all. The rooms of our house are on different levels, it’s not just two floors, but there are steps down into the kitchen, up to the bathroom, from the landing to a bedroom – so if I walk around from room to room, which I like to do when I’m confronting the big questions and thinking and ruminating and considering, I have to go up and down several flights of stairs. They may only be two or three steps, but they’re still steps up and down, and my knee hurts when I go up or down them. Sometimes it’s stiff, and sometimes it hurts, and sometimes it’s stiff and hurts all at the same time. My wife says it’s my age but I tell her I’m not old, not by today’s standards.
Is it the right or the left? I hear you ask as you read this and leak a few drops of what passes for sympathy in our social circle, or would if you weren’t at home being fed grapes by your latest concubine. Well, it’s my right, but from your viewpoint it would be on the left. Everything of any importance tends to depend upon one’s point of view, and on where one stands when considering the issue at hand. I say that to all my chattering friends when they chatter about an important topic, like, for instance, a war in a poor country, or the price of Prosecco. But in this case I’m not at all sure it’s relevant. Pain knows nothing and cares less about relative positions, and neither does stiffness in the joints – they both simply concentrate on the job in hand, which is to inflict a degree of misery, which degree is itself relative, of course.
When did this knee trouble begin? I hear you ask as you read this and prepare to dribble platitudes out of the corners of your mouth. I’m thankful we’re not in the same room. The last time we were together in the same room it was all I could do not to give you a good kicking. It was only my wife dissuaded me, with a very cogent argument regarding constraint and legal considerations that drew upon her years as a typist with a highly respectable firm of solicitors. Well, to answer your question, I think it was Sunday, or perhaps Saturday. I had climbed on to a chair to try to destroy a cobweb that had established itself in an upper reach of the bedroom, and I felt a twinge as I climbed down – the cobweb stayed where it was; I needed to get a broom, for Christ’s sake, I couldn’t reach it with the brush – and after that things began to go headlong downhill, because I managed also to stumble into a shelf and knock the photograph of my wife’s parents to the floor, breaking the frame, and my wife’s not happy, and an hour or so later my knee began to really hurt. The next day it was stiff and hurting, and here we are now, with one eye on conflict in the Middle East, another on Ukraine, and the world’s burning up, and I’m complaining about my knee.
Oh, I just got a text from my friend Stephen. He wants to know if I’m up for playing on the left wing on Saturday. He’s a bit of a jester is Gavin. It’s code for ‘Do I want to go out for a beer?’ We used both to play for West Town Rangers in our younger days, and he likes to hold on to those times, even though they’re long gone and will never return. I send him a text back, saying I won’t be able to make it because we’re off to the wife’s sister’s for the weekend. The brother-in-law is a GP, so I can ask him about my knee if it’s still playing me up.
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Conrad Titmuss
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