Feeling Girly

When I get back from my ski holiday, with a fracture in a bone I didn’t even know I had, I realise that at least this is a genuine Sports Injury, which gives me a bit of credibility round here. My last injury was a sprained ankle I got falling downstairs on the way to a bar in Spain, which got a few laughs, but not much respect. I also try to drop it into the conversation that I did it while ski-ing with a freestyle pro. I don’t exactly say that I was going down a vertical couloir carving S-bends in the epic powder snow, but I don’t deny it either. I let it hang in the air as a possibility.…
I certainly don’t say that she was giving me style tips on the beginners piste.
“It’s a great opportunity to do things you never get a chance to do, write a diary, read some good books, do some painting.…” people tell me.
But I spend most of my life doing that anyway, and my diary is a little on the slow side. I’m just lying in bed all day, making the occasional excursion to the kitchen for an ice pack, or a snack that can be prepared with one leg and no hands. I feel like I have some insight into what it would be like to be very very old or very very lazy.
Apart from that, my brain seems to have atrophied along with my thigh, so I do something else I never get a chance to do - watch a lot of soap operas on TV. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to pick a hospital drama - after 17 episodes of Gray’s Anatomy, I’m back in the emergency room with a suspected blood clot. The episode where the woman comes in with hiccups and leaves in a body bag is running through my head.
“You can’t expect it to be full of hot surgeons like on TV,” Daisy tells me. But this is Biarritz, and I can. There are several doctors I’d drag into the on-call room if I was a steamy young nurse. But I’m just a 50-year-old woman with a red lump on my leg and a daytime TV habit, and they only seem interested in my knees, and the red thing which turns out not to be a blood clot after all. it’s either a burst blood vessel or a bruise
After my initial relief that I’m not about to die, I’m a bit worried that I’m developing Munchausen syndrome. Have I really just come into the ER with a bruise?
But when I get home there’s an e-mail from my friend who’s a nurse saying it sounds like a thromboflibitus, which sounds a lot more glamorous.


The crutches have their uses, apart from the obvious one of being able to walk on one leg. They’re handy for queue jumping, illegal parking and bringing out the nurturing, “we’re from Venus too” side in men.
This is something I usually find it hard to tap into. On the inside I’m as soft and gooey as a milk chocolate strawberry cream. This is because I’m a Pisces Woman. This quote from an astrology website sums it up; ‘Pisces woman is full of womanly charms - totally vulnerable, very different from the modern liberated girl of today. The warmth of her personality makes men relax in an instant and bask in the glory of their manhood.’
But let’s face it, it can get a bit irritating when men bask too much in the glory of their manhood, so sometimes I feel the need to turn to Chinese astrology, where I get to be a Metal Rat. We’re obstinate, determined and ‘make good world leaders’. Hmm, I was looking for a new career direction, I was thinking of surf photographer, but you have to be open-minded.
I like to project this side of my personality to compensate for the soft-focus, Mateus Rosé side, but as a result men never seem too keen on looking after me.
Until now. Doors swing open as I approach, men carry my shopping out of the supermarket for me, and give up their barstools without a fight. One day I go into a surf shop to buy some orthopedic flip flops. There’s a press conference for a Hawaiian surf company going on.
“Oh no, what happened to you?” Someone asks as I hop up to the counter.
“Sports Injury, fractured tibial spine with a touch of thromboflibitus, suspected rupture of the posterior cross ligament.” Okay, back to Desperate Housewives next week.
“Were you ski-ing or snowboarding?” Oh, cool, I can’t believe anyone thinks I’m young enough, hip enough or fit enough to snowboard. Or once was.
“Carving S-bends in the epic powder over in Verbier. With my friend who’s a stunt skier.” Come on, there’s no snow around here, no-one will ever know. But hang on, maybe I should have pretended I slipped on a leaf while arranging flowers, or tripped on my apron strings while baking a sponge cake.
Never mind, they invite us to a party later.
“Wow, you scrub up nicely.” The man who invited me says when I limp into the bar.
I’m not sure whether to take this as a compliment or not . What did I look like before? But I forgive him when he sits me down and brings me a plate of sushi and a pitcher of beer. I make a mental note to keep the crutches afterwards.
“I thought the glasses looked a bit pathetic.” I’m with him on this, beer comes in small or large size down here. Large is a demi, which is less than half a pint, and small is a bock, which translates as a sip.
This guy has the most hardcore surf history you could get. His father closed up his doctors surgery in California in 1958 and took his wife and nine children on an Endless Summer surf odyssey throughout the sixties. The kids surfed all day long and never went to school.
I’m quite fascinated, partly because I tried my own small scale version of this. One problem was the lack of wilderness in Europe. Just when you thought you’d found the road to nowhere, you’d end up in a campsite called Playa Tropicana, full of old age pensioners on their way to or from Marbella. A strange tribe of people in quilted dressing gowns and plastic slippers who like to bring the kitchen sink on holiday with them. Of course they have every right to do it, but it kind of spoilt the last frontier vibe for us.
Another problem was the home schooling. I didn’t surf, so I was the one who got left in the campsite with the kids, while their dad rode the wild wave half a mile off shore. It should have been easy enough, it was only primary school reading and maths... except that it was in irish gaelic. So I’d be stuck in the twilight zone reading through long division questions that sounded like epic Celtic poems, and were just as incomprehensible to me.
In the end I put them back in school and learned to surf, but it’s interesting to meet someone who’s lived the dream.
So it's hard to understand why my friend Kenny, who brought me here, decides to change the subject .... to my kitchen. Maybe it was the story Jonathan was telling us about falling of his board into the Hudson river and getting poisoned by septic rats.
"Well, Wilma might scrub up nicely," he says, "but her kitchen certainly doesn't."
What?
"Here, look at these pictures I took while she was fetching her crutches tonight."
What??? I can't believe it. I mean I'm not housewife of the year, I never said I was, but I'm injured, what does he expect?
"Have you ever tried doing housework on crutches?" My son has, I made him clear the table with them when I thought he was a bit short on sympathy.
"Yes, but I saw your kitchen before you broke your knee." He's got a point, my kitchen always looks like an eartquake hit it, it's just gone up a few points on the Richter scale recently. There might be moments when it would be appropriate to bring it up - if we were just about to move in together maybe- but half way through the first beer? It seems pretty unfair to be sitting in a roomful of surf dudes examining the contents of my dustpan... "Oh yes, that's half a cornichon I think, and some cocktail sticks..."
When he says he finds it quite attractive, I'm not sure whether to give him my phone number or the phone number of a good psychiatrist.
“It’s strange,” he says as I finish my second pitcher of beer, “the crutches are attractive too, they make you seem all girly and vulnerable.”
It’s an awkward moment... how can I tell him that beneath the soft Pisces exterior lurks a metal rat bent on world domination?