Let us start with an apocryphal story.
Back in 1981 I had a whirlwind courtship with a lady who lived in a suburb of Manchester (England, not New England).
She was into astrology - well sort of. She had this book by a lady called Linda Goodman (?) which she used as a sort of Bible. When she first met me, she decided that I was a Leo. Out comes the book, all the references checked etc. She should have known this lot already - her ex-husband was a Leo, as was her 10-year-old daughter. I finally got round to reading this guidebook on how to divide totally accurately the world's entire population by 12. I remember one punchline which read along the lines:
"If your Leo boyfriend tells you he has no money, he has probably gambled it all away".
The fact that I had no money resulted from the fact that I had changed careers 2 years previously, relocated (to a more expensive city), retrained (which cost a fair bit), and walked straight out into the Thatcher revolution - one of the basic rules of which was that the people of the North of England were supposed either not to work for a living (why else did the government need dole queues?), or were supposed to work for wages that would be less than what people were earning in China.
I did not, at that time, gamble at all. Even now an occasional investment of 9 Euro 25 Cents on the German lottery is as far as it goes.
One of the few things in this section on the Leo male that did sound right (give it a score of 3 out of 10 for trying) was that they have a tendency to show off (well if you've got it, flaunt it, but don't lie or exaggerate!).
As our relationship cooled, she went back to the guidebook and reinvented the script. I was not a Leo, I was a Cancer. Oh, good, that explains everything. Really?
Read the chapter in the book, discovered that I was a very private person (true, nowt to be ashamed of), and very secretive. Huh? Very typical of many people from the North of England - get straight to the point, spell out the facts, be blunt and to the point. What's to keep secret? Just ask, you'll get told. That chapter got 1 out of 10. Apart from the bit on privacy, there was nowt which fitted.
The relationship fell apart (thank you, Ms Goodman (?)). We met accidentally 6 months later and tried it again for another 3 months. Eventually our personalities and expectations just did not mesh, even if we were physically ridiculously well suited.
Anyway this mixture of being a private person with an occasional need to show off was to reappear (painfully) on July 7th this year. Monday evening, just after 18:00 (6.00 PM if you insist), I got onto an S-Bahn train, noted an empty seat, and made for it before anyone else got there. Someone should have told me that the floor was slippery for some reason. My extremely comfortable shoes also had heels which were worn down, and the combination (along with more than a bit of slapstick and Hollywood) led to me flying through the air with the greatest of ease ....
And landing directly on my right shoulder. No time to get anything else in the way. If I had got my hand down to stop the fall, what I might have done to my hand or my fingers - no good ending was possible.
Maybe I had expected a Hollywood film producer or a German TV producer to be on the train and I wanted to show off my prowess in taking a fall. No such luck!
Three very kind people picked me up, put me down in a seat, asked if I needed a doctor (I refused). Then maybe thinking that I must be drunk (I never get drunk, I don't even drink alcohol that early in the evening) or totally crazy (no comment!), they quickly wandered off down the train.
15 minutes to get near home on the train, 5 minutes to walk home from the station, the pain was obvious but not excruciating. In 2008 I had survived two days at work including trekking across Paris both days, getting a suitcase to the station and a train back to Frankfurt, and three days obstreperously refusing to admit that I had owt more serious than chronic indigestion before giving way to my wife's imprecations to go to the hospital to be checked out. A heart attack requiring a triple bypass? Come on, I will lose my job, my income, I will end up totally broke!
My wife won the argument, I had the operation, I lost my job, my income and ended up totally broke .....
This time though I decided upon a more subtle approach. On getting home, my introductory line was:
"I think, dear, I may have to go to the hospital". Not quite blunt and and direct to the point, but getting there!
I must check out Ms Goodman (?)'s chapter on the Cancer female some time. After she had wasted three minutes asking silly questions like why I hadn't gone directly to the hospital (the answer - that I was already on the train coming home, so going to the hospital would have meant getting off it usw. It was as quick to come home - did not impress her one bit!), we headed off to get a taxi. The driver, a Pakistani immigrant, selected the most convenient hospital, and spent the rest of the journey pointing out how he had become a successful entrepreneur in Germany (even employing his own son) and most other immigrants here were far too lazy usw .....
It took about three and a half hours to get through all the rituals. As I am normally pretty cynical, if not downright pessimistic, my often blasé attitude to my health problems irritates my wife no end. She had already been down this road in 2008 - being told that it might be nowt serious usw. Still convinced that it was probably nowt more than severe bruising, being struck by the reality that the shoulder was broken did not cheer me up at all.
Perhaps being a pessimist makes sense after all. Even the lady doctor's wonderful reassuring tone when telling me did not ease the mental agony, which was considerably greater than the physical pain at this point.
My wife at least seemed reassured. She took me home in another taxi, had the fun of having to undress me (NB - old men like me are definitely NOT sexy!), wash me, and .... even brush my teeth for me. It is interesting after 60+ years of brushing my teeth with the toothbrush always in my right hand how clumsy it seems trying to use your left hand for the purpose!
The following morning I also realised that I could not write at all (my left hand had never been trained for that purpose), and the computer keyboard could be only manipulated very slowly, typing one letter at a time with my left hand. Eating, holding a coffee cup, slicing the cheese .... Where have I been all my life making limited use of my left hand? Suddenly I need to do absolutely everything with it!
And as for trying to spread margarine on the toast! Now that was funny!
To be continued in Part 2
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