It looks as though I have lost/mislaid my current notebook. This is a bad thing.
It is a bad thing because the notebook represents, in however scrappy a form, my thoughts and ideas over a period of months. It is also a bad thing because I am fairly free with my thoughts and ideas in it. True, there are mundane comments about the weather and whether or not I had a lane to myself for my morning swim, but my thoughts can be more wide-ranging and much more personal than that!
The only built-in security system, that virtually encrypts the notes themselves is the almost illegible scrawl in which they are written. I have to admit that I sometimes, no quite often, find myself puzzling over certain extravagant calligraphic patterns and wondering if they have any relation whatsoever to English orthography. This ‘difficulty’ does give a certain freshness to a perusal when undertaken long after the words were written.
I have hunted around all the spots in the house where the small, pocket-sized, notebook could have been discarded or lodged. I have checked pockets in a range of clothing. I have checked down the side of the armchair that I use. I have checked the car seats. I have looked everywhere reasonable that could be a place where the notebook could be. I have even looked in places where, where it to be there, I would spend the rest of my life wondering how it possibly got there. But in places reasonable and unreasonable, the more I look, the more (as they say) it isn’t there.
The only place left is the swimming pool. At the end of my morning swim, as I have my expertly made cup of tea, I write. I write something, anything, just to keep the process going. Sometimes I am less than convinced by what I produce, but at other times the notes seem to write themselves and there is a sort of genuine excitement in the hastily scribbled lines.
In some ways, I am hesitant to ask in the pool, because if they say that nothing has been handed in or found, then I am left with irreconcilable loss.
Though, having said that, I have taken the cellophane off a notebook-in-waiting, and I jotted down my thoughts for the day. Tomorrow will be the test, and if nothing is put aside waiting for the owner to turn up, then I will accept the fact that The White Notebook is no more, and I will get on with the new red one.
After a couple of days hiatus, my doctor phoned me in response to my asking for an appointment to see him with a view to Getting Something Done about my knees.
I suppose that prior telephone conversation is the new normal for medical appointments nowadays, almost like a telephonic triage to see by electronic conversation whether further consultation of a more immediate and personal nature is necessary.
As my knees have never been the same after a few tumbles form my bike, an x-ray was deemed necessary and I was given the time of a possible face-to-face appointment, as long as the x-rays had been taken before hand.
I was phoned with the date and time of an appointment for an x-ray examination in short measure, and I was (or at least the knee part of me) was snapped from various angles and I was sent on my way. This means that the x-rays are already in the possession of the doctor and my appointment on Monday of next week will be the next step in outlining the possible courses of action.
It is at this point that I am reminded of an old tennis injury – well, not so much from the actual game itself, but rather from not quite jumping over the net to celebrate my victory, and landing on my elbow. I split the bone and the bone has never been quite the same. Some years after the initial injury, I had major problems with fluid collecting around the joint and then with persistent pain.
The fluid was drained off, but the pain in my elbow and the arm did not give in so easily.
After a failed process of sports massage (horrific!) and more conventional remedial massage failed to do the trick, I was sent back to the doctor, and I was given a (fairly gruesome) series of cortisone (I think) injections. The term ‘series’ gives the impression of a number of injections stretching over an extended period of time. It was not like that. What I had was a single injection but administered in a sort-of internal jabbing sort of way.
Whatever! When I left the doctor’s surgery at the end of the jabbing, I had no pain. It was positively magical. And the problem has not (touch wood!) recurred.
I am hoping that there is some sort of similar ‘magical’ injection that will do its stuff with my knees. But my more fatalistic reality check suggests that the ‘answer’ will probably be an operation or two.
My house is almost comically unfit for a person to recuperate who does not have full use of his limbs: the living room is on the first floor and the loo is on the second and my computer and printer is on the third. There are lots of stairs and there is no lift. Toni’s suggestion that there would be no problem as I could live in the bedroom, with an invalid table and a laptop, is not to be considered without hysteria.
Monday may well turn out to be a defining moment in my time in Catalonia.
Or, given the backlog in routine operations, any medical intervention may be years in the future. And that too, is rather a depressing thought.
But I am running ahead of myself. Sufficient unto the day is the imagining thereof!
Let’s wait for something a little more concrete than frantic supposition!
