Broken Leg Blues Part II: Cider With Whoosie

Nil by mouth – three of the most dispiriting words in the English Language.  ‘And no sucking the sponge either!’ scolded the nurse as she handed me a little cup of pink liquid so that I could moisten my lips, simultaneously moving the water jug out of my (very limited) reach.  

The hours slipped by like coarse-grained sandpaper.  I’d had the presence of mind to stuff the nearest book to hand – ‘Cider With Rosie’ – into my bag as I left home the day before, but given that I felt as if I’d downed half the contents of the title, I did some desultory Facebooking instead, wondering idly what this month’s mobile bill was going to be like and how my other ankle was going to like being hopped on when it was bruised and swollen in its own right.

(Yep, part of that bruise is a tattoo.)

Then I was prepped ready to go to theatre, not because anyone had any idea when my operation was scheduled but because ‘they have a habit of just turning up’.  Rather more excitingly, ‘my’ anaesthetist materialised to go through some paperwork with me.  ‘I’m your anaesthetist,’ he said.  This, apparently, was A Sign.  

And lo, blue-overalls appeared with a trolley and off we went to theatre.  ‘Anything you want to ask me?’ asked a different anaesthetist to the one who’d been up to the ward.  ‘I’ve got arthritis and they told me not to bring my special pillows down because I might never see them again,’ I babbled, ‘and I’m really scared of coming round on my back with my head turned to one side.  I can't move my head unless I use my hands and it feels like I’m paralysed and it’s really scary.’  ‘Ah, torticollis cervical spondylosis’ he said, reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t let your head fall off.’  And I knew I’d be fine because he knew exactly what I was talking about even if I didn’t have a clue. The operation would probably be OK too. 

And it was. A bit of desultory moaning about the parking situation at the hospital between surgeon and anaesthetist (I live in the Residents’ Controlled Parking Zone) and the next thing I knew someone was calling my name and my head was miraculously still attached to my neck and facing forward with no apparent support.  

Then I was back on the ward and my partner and son turned up and we did the Guardian Quick Crossword and I ate the food they brought me and puked up in a bed pan.

Frosty the Snowman comes out in sympathy

And I did a lot of thinking about how I’d barely jaunted and barely written a word the last few weeks, what with Christmas and having to get the house ready to sell, and how I had been on such a roll last weekend that I’d contemplated swinging a sickie from work so as not to lose momentum, and how I’d decided I couldn’t possibly bunk off because I’m rubbish at lying and the universe would punish me, and how it had punished me anyway just for thinking about pretending to be ill by ensuring that I would be off for the next six weeks but completely incapable of doing all the things I need to do to get the house on the market.  And how I’d have to delegate more rather than do, and how I would probably end up writing some poems after all.  

As I Walked Out One Autumn Morning

Friday being overcast but dry, it was off on a literary jaunt with two of my writing friends, Kate and Kathy, and Ted. Our destination was Slad, just north of Stroud, the home village and last resting place of the writer and poet, Laurie Lee.


First stop, the Church of the Holy Trinity, a pleasing simple Victorian edifice opposite the Woolpack pub, both of which were very familiar to Slad’s most famous son – indeed, he’s buried between the two.

I re-read ‘Cider with Rosie’, Lee’s account of his rural childhood between the wars, over the summer and enjoyed it as much as when I was a teenager, although this time around I was more shocked by the hardship and sporadic brutality of the lives described.  


Also by how touching his depiction of his dreamy mother is – her thwarted passions and her unending struggle to do her best for her children and step-children in the face of their father’s defection to suburbia.

'Her flowers and songs, her unshaken fidelities, her attempts at order, her relapses into squalor, her near madness, her crying for light, her almost daily weeping for her dead child-daughter, her frisks and gaieties, her fits of screams, her love of man, her hysterical rages, her justice towards each of us children - all these rode my Mother and sat on her shoulders like a roosting of ravens and doves.' 

This is the house in which Lee and the rest of the family lived. Aficionados will remember that they occupied the down-stroke of the T, the cross-stroke being inhabited by Granny Trill and Granny Wallon, perpetually at war and who died within days of each other.

So wonderful to see where it all happened, not so very long ago but a world away.

'Meanwhile the old people just dropped away - the white-whiskered, gaitered, booted and bonneted, ancient-tongued last of their world, who thee'd and thou’d both man and beast, called young girls 'damsels', young boys 'squires', old men 'masters', the Squire himself 'He', and who remembered the Birdlip stagecoach, Kicker Harris the old coachman...’

After exploring the village, we went for what should have been a five and a half mile wander through the wooded valley; however, the footpath petered out part way through and we ended up scrambling a lot further than that. No matter, we figured Laurie never stuck to the paths either, and Ted enjoyed intimidating the numerous pheasants we encountered.

There were glimpsed grey and green views, constellations of fungi, leaf-littered droves, oranges, Kathy's sinisterly dark treacle gingerbread, and cliffs of golden Cotswold limestone ...

Lovely!