These Arms of Mine

Two weeks ago I lost the use of one of my arms.

I should, of course, point out that it is only a temporary inconvenience before you all start suggesting I get myself training for Rio 2016. The Paralympics have indeed shown that almost anything is possible with only one arm or in some cases none at all – in the process scuppering any hope I might have had of garnering much sympathy for my situation – and so it is perhaps a little wrong for me to claim too much of a disability, particularly since six weeks doesn’t exactly stack up against the lifetime of inconvenience some people have to go through.

However, one thing is clear: living with only one arm is not that easy. In fact, I think it goes to show that God certainly knew what he was doing when he gave us two. Whether it’s hugging a loved one or squeezing the toothpaste on to the brush, two hands don’t half make the job easier...

Here are five things that two arms undoubtedly do better than one:

1) Semaphore

2) Getting peanut butter out of the jar and onto that piece of toast

3) Typing

4) Opening the pouch of cat food when your wife is late home from work and the cat is scratching everything in sight wondering just what it did to be denied its dinner

5) Climbing trees

It’s not all doom and gloom though. On Tuesday, I finally conquered the crisps, cutting open a packet with a pair of scissors while it rested against the bread board at the optimum severance angle. I was triumphant and rightly so, I feel. OK, so I haven’t exactly hits the heights of survival shown in the film 127 hours (definitely worth watching if you get the chance) but at least my world had a greater salt and vinegar flavour to it than the last 10 days had brought.

Typing has been a little harder. This blog post has been written with very few fingers at all, with the voice activation software on Windows 7 doing most of the work. I still have to talk though, so it’s not been a complete breeze. For some reason, they still haven’t invented a device that types out your thoughts so that you can just sit back on the sofa while your novel is written by the computer. Feel free to go on Dragons’ Den with that one if you can come up with a solution...

For now, I leave you with this thought: cherish your arms. Both of them. Look after them and keep them safe. And, the next time you’re spreading peanut butter with consummate ease, think of me munching on my dry bread, ducking under the ironing board to try and stop the cat scratching the chair and gazing longingly at that tree I could never climb.

In a few weeks I will be like the rest of you, opening pouches until there isn’t a pouch left to open. Until then, use your arms wisely my friends and – here comes the sentimental ending – give someone a big old hug this evening while you still can.

If they ask you what you’re doing, tell them you’re doing it for Sam.

A Day at the Races

On Saturday evening, I met the superhumans.

When I say met, I do of course mean that I sat at a considerable distance and waved a cheap plastic flag in their direction but, in this time of goodwill and community spirit, I’m sure you’ll permit me more than a slight nod in the direction of my good friend hyperbole.

It was some meeting too. Pistorius’ blades sliced through the air at a considerable speed, a Chinese triple-jumper leapt a full two metres further than his nearest competitor and Jason Smyth’s Bolt-esque domination of the 100m was quite simply incredible to behold. I clapped and I clapped and I clapped some more, ever wary that all this over-eager clapping could at any moment send my shoulder rocketing out of joint to rack up dislocation number 11, and waved with patriotic pride as the British runners generously donated the medal positions to our international visitors.

Walking through the Olympic Park for hours on end as we awaited the athletics it was clear that something was clearly not right. People were actually smiling and enjoying being in the presence of other people. The lion was indeed well and truly laying down with the lamb and not even the presence of two poorly placed trees slightly blocking the view of the big screen could dampen the mood. Rather, a general sense of unease permeated the park as we all realised that we simply had nothing to moan about. In fact, perhaps the only complaint we could have is that things didn’t actually turn out quite so badly as we all thought they would. Surely they could have at least forgotten the ramps for the wheelchairs or something, couldn’t they, so that we could all enjoy a good grumble?

Alas, the world has seen us as we have never even seen ourselves before. We are, it seems, a people who can cheer everyone on through triumph and adversity, who can put our metaphorical arms around anyone and anything that could do with a good hug, who can get things right when it matters most.

It’s all a bit tiring though, isn’t it? I’m sure we’ll all take a deep sigh of relief when we can finally stop celebrating things. Christmas is going to get a raw deal this year and Fireworks night might as well not even bother turning up.

Sparklers? That’s nothing. We’ve seen Becks on a speed boat. We’ve seen Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah. We’ve seen the world sparkle.

Put that on your bonfire.

Work for the Working Man

Unbelievably, I am being expected to go to work tomorrow.

You might as well go right ahead and wipe that ‘A Day in the Life’ post from your memory banks (assuming you haven’t done so already) because it ain’t happening again for a long time…

Well, not until Friday at least.

Friday? National Crunchie Day? The ‘Thank God It’s…’ day? That one?

That’s it, you’ve got it in one. The day after Thursday will indeed herald a return to the halcyon days of waving my wife off to work while I think of more words beginning with ‘w’ to continue this impressively-alliterative sentence. Unfortunately, I may need to try and be slightly more productive than I have been over the course of this summer but one thing remains consistent: the day will be mine.

After much bargaining, arm-wrestling, pleading and hunger-strike-threatening, I have secured every Friday off for the foreseeable future to further my foray into the world of unnecessary alliteration, hopefully achieving the added bonus of accomplishing more than was possible these past three years. Excited? You should be.

In the meantime, I need to navigate myself through the next three days of what I like to call ‘actual work’. Contrary to all expectation, I am employed as an English teacher (apologies if this is news to you and you’d now like to trawl all previous posts to hunt down the inevitable errors that render this claim absurd) and so I am all set to jump on the ‘we was robbed’ bandwagon regarding the recent results as we dissect, reflect and something else ending in –ect before settling down to realise that yes it would indeed have been nice if more people had achieved a C grade but what are you going to do?

I’m not sure what we’ll do, to be honest, but at some stage groups of students will appear before me and I’ll be expected to string a few sentences together. Perhaps some of them will even smile at a few of them or offer me a nod of appreciation, doffing their metaphorical cap in my direction as they stride out of the classroom thanking me for all I have taught them?

Or perhaps I will dream of Crunchies and will hum along to Friday, I’m in Love (stay tuned for that inevitable blog title) while all around me is chaos?

Whatever happens, there’ll be no Twitter checking or time spent gazing out of the window wondering why on earth my package hasn’t been delivered yet. No, professional man that I am I give you this promise: I will be at work and I will give it my all for four days every week.

But not the fifth day. Oh no. That’ll be mine. Always mine.

(It’s Good) To Be Free

The best things in life are free.
For five days, so is the script for Who’s the Baby?. Unlikely to make many people’s ‘Top 10 Best Things in Life’ list I know, but free it is nonetheless, reckless promotion-hunting freak that I am.
Basically, this is for everyone out there who said ‘you know what, I like the blog and I like the sound of a play with the word baby in it but you have got to be kidding if you think I’m shelling out 77p for something like that.’
Perhaps you’ve never read a play script on your Kindle before? Perhaps you don’t even own a Kindle but are desperate for the first play script to read on your Kindle software on your PC, Laptop or Phone? Or perhaps you’re simply hear expecting another tale of gourmet fish and attempted murder and are by now, quite frankly, extremely disappointed?
Whatever your thoughts at this exact point, at least I’m not asking you to pay anything. You’ve got to give me that.
It would be nice if more things were free, wouldn’t it? Paying for things really puts a dampener on life. I’ve tried to accommodate this thinking by only charging 99p for It was the tree’s fault and £1.99 for Accidental Crime but I appreciate that even that falls someway short of the heady world we’d all like to live in where we simply take things and enjoy them. Kind of like the riots last summer, only less illegal and with fewer fires.
Here’s my slightly more realistic dream: hundreds of people download Who’s the Baby? for free, think to themselves ‘it would be fun to put this play on at Christmas’ and this December churches across the country (if not the world! – no, too big) put on productions to reach thousands of people with the message.
I wouldn’t get a single penny for any of this but, I’ll tell you what, I’d rather see that happen than sell 1,000 copies of Accidental Crime this week…
(P.S. I’d be perfectly happy to sell 1,000 copies as well, just in case you were wondering.)

This Is My House

Sometimes it can be hard to know what to write about. It doesn’t matter how many staircases you climb – literal or metaphorical, take your pick – you simply cannot focus in on that tale that must be told. You can take a walk to clear your head, surf the net to fill your head or position yourself in the way of a swinging bag to hurt your head, but sometimes the ideas just aren’t there.

Then, one day, one lonely day when you least expect it, someone knocks on your door (quite literally) and practically writes the blog for you…

‘Hello!’ he called out, my 28 year-old face staring back at him. ‘Are your parents home?’

My parents? Um. Hmm. Let’s see. Would those be the parents whose house I left over 10 years ago and who probably are at home in their house 4 hours away from here?

‘This is my house,’ I responded, confidently (because, you see, it is my house – I’m a big fan of the truth).

‘Oh,’ he replied, slightly taken aback. ‘I’m just doing a bit of cold calling and I was wondering whether you’d be interested in some gourmet fish?’

Well, at least he wasn’t trying to get me to change energy supplier. Perhaps he’d seen the glint of a Cambridge graduate in my eye or something?

After a brief exchange in which I blamed my wife’s occasional vomiting problem on fish, it was clear that the cold calling wasn’t getting any warmer and so he began retreating, speaking as he did so:

‘Oh, and sorry I questioned your ability to own a house.’

So, it seemed we had gone from me being confused for a child to now being someone incapable of owning a house. Perhaps he actually did think I was 28 – or in my twenties at least – but one quick look as the door swung open communicated quite clearly, in his mind, that this man was certainly not capable of home ownership?

What exactly is the look of a man capable of owning a house? What am I lacking that I need to start doing?

Should I be rubbing the door post with my ‘owner’s hand’, as if stating quite clearly: this is mine, or should I reach out my hand ready to shake the salesman by his while shouting ‘Welcome to my house!’, ready to follow up with ‘I bought it with my own money…and the bank’s’ as soon as that first look of doubt appeared?

I suppose the obvious answer is to get a plaque. Something that makes it absolutely clear that the house belongs to ‘people who look unlikely to own it’ (I’m unfairly including my wife in this, I know, but I banking on her being happy to stand with me in solidarity). Maybe I could even stick a photo of us on the door to lessen the shock?

And, if all else fails, I suppose I should simply nod and say ‘yes, my parents are indeed home, so if you get on the next train to Norwich you should catch them by mid-afternoon’.

Or – and this is definitely the final or – I could always grow a beard. Beards scream out home owner, don’t they?