D'oh!

I'm in that odd state still, where you have just got back from another country and still feel a little like a visitor in your own life. You compare everything to where you have been, miss the salad bar, the tea, and everything seems to ba made of plastic again. There just seems to be so little wood, and everything seems a little grubby and ordinary. Last night I was sorry to miss a gig in Liverpool, because I did myself an injury. The official story is that I slid on the ice in Finland and my hands have been swollen and painful, gradually getting moreso ever since. This seems alot less Mr Bump and clumsy than the truth, it also sounds more beleiveable. The truth is the morning after I returned from Finland I heard the postman knock at the door. It was dark, and I was wearing slippers 3 sizes too big for me, I ran to the window to gesture to him to hang on a sec while I found the keys, and on the way there tripped over the furniture I had forgetten I had rearranged. Banged my chin on a stool, twisted weirdly, and felt like my hands were lobsters ever since. The parcel was infact for next door.

So yesterday I had that sick child in the summer hols feeling, kept thinking of all the things I was missing due to my foolish hands. I kept thinking about Jo Colley and Kate Fox who had gone to Liverpool, and even though I decided they would probably enjoy the gig better without me (had more time to read more of their own poems), I was sorry to not be there and find out if some people in Liverpool might like my work. I started to worry a little about seeming unprofessional, and also that these two poets who had previously been my colleagues but also friends might talk about me and decide negative things. ( Always seemed like that at school, you'd have a day off sick and when you got back your friends had decided they didn't like you afterall and were off giggling in corners someplace together.) Given I had to stay home, I then started to think about the Tom kelly and Kevin Cadwallender gig and was sorry to be to miss that too. All these stupid thoughts from sheer clumsiness. My hands are a bit better today, but they still aren't right.

Actually I don't like to look at my hands. They are big and ugly. They are not nice birdlike creatures that can flutter into any formation at a compliment or a smile. They are hands that do not have tapered fingers that can play piano or reach for a small scone. They will never twiddle with a pearl necklace. They are more like mans hands, big, fat, hands that lug stuff and scrub. There is a scar off a swiss arm knife that disobeyed when i was trying to open a bottle of wine 10 years ago, and a scar that matches on the corresponding finger opposite that happened when I was cutting a slice of bread. On the backs of my hands are scars from playing chicken at school. I never lost, but the scars wish I had. Inside my finger there is red sore patch from a blister made holding a paint scraper.

My hands don't get alot of my attention, except now they aren't themselves, when I am forced to look at them, and ask do they look right? Is that bit swollen? I can't take my eyes off them, and am suddenly grateful that even ugly hands are so essential. What they do makes them seem less offensive, but I have to take to take it easy on them until they feel like my hands again. So less of this typing- any ideas of things you can do without using your hands?