The Longest Journey
Last Thursday a bloke arrived here.
He was a grand cheerful chatty bloke, and he was here to fix a second handrail on the stairs up to the attic, all courtesy of our Glorious Health Service. Herself had great difficulty with the stairs as there was only the one handrail and the health visitor had insisted she needed two.
The next day Herself decided it was time she went downstairs [for the first time in weeks] to give the lovely new rail its first test.
I helped her out of bed and we made our way to the stairs with myself leading the way. We got to the turn in the stairs when her knee joint gave way. She sat down screeching in agony. Fuck!
I should mention that the stairs are narrow [and the new handrail made them narrower], and at the bend in the stairs the ceiling is very low. It is not a spot for easy manoeuvring.
I tried to help her up from the front, but the space was too cramped. I managed to climb over her to try lifting from the back but she was too low and my own back couldn’t take it. We were stuck.
I phoned Daughter as she’s an expert in these matters and she promptly arrived. She tried the various techniques that I had tried and failed as well. We tried together. No go. We were well and truly stuck and Herself was in severe pain.
Daughter phoned for an ambulance which duly arrived. The two lads had to use some kind of specialist lifting equipment to extricate Herself and I mentioned on Saturday the fun we had after that.
So we started to go downstairs at around half three on Friday afternoon and eventually arrived downstairs at around one on Saturday morning. That must be a record for the slowest descent of a staircase?
She has been downstairs ever since and refuses to go back up. Not that I blame her. At least she has been having great fun on her new electric chair. I still haven’t tried tossing her onto the floor though. I’ll wait until she’s in a bad mood for that.
And she still hasn’t tried out the new handrail.
Perfectly horrible. I’m sorry you two (or three, counting daughter in) had to go through that!
(Something’s up with the Reply function – while typing a new tab was opened without my say so! Just in case you’re wondering why only me has replied so far.)
All part of life’s rich tapestry.
The Reply thing is strange. It’s fine for me and I haven’t changed anything. The Russians? The EU?
My replies [if any] seem to come late in the evening/night. My theory is that it’s all the insomniacs who have read everything in their quest for sleep, and hit this site as a last resort.
Just sending this as a test – no new tab so far. Good luck with your travails
“hit this site as a last resort.”
Nope, I check every day to see what mayhem you have caused/experienced as soon as possible in the afternoon. It brightens my day.
Sorry to read about the latest disaster, do hope her indoors is recovering quickly. Please give her my best wishes.
Wow. I can truly empathize with the situation. Wish I had been there to help.
Aw geez, well… our best to dear Celeste. <3 We have people here too who show up and do things like that if poor health necessitates it. We may not have the socialized medicine you enjoy, but there are programs.For example, we might be qualifying to have someone come in and clean once a week. Neither of us can really do it, my respiratory issues make it difficult and Dorian is definitely not able to work with cleansers and solvents and things like that. Do you think a French Maid’s outfit is too much to ask of a young lady coming over to clean for free? Aw, who am I kidding? It’ll probably be some older dude named Julio. In which case a French maid outfit would be quite entertaining.BTW, I’m an idiot.This is because since I picked up your blog again, I haven’t gotten mailed a single answer to any comments I may have posted. At first, I was thinking, “Man, what a standoffish oaf that Grandad is, answering everyone but me, why am I getting ignored here?”Then I noticed that I’ve been using the wrong email address all along. What I’ve been filling in (and it auto-fills now, so I’ll have to get that off my auto-form) is an address I created a few years ago and then deleted the whole Google account for some reason I don’t recollect.So you’ll probably have to re-approve my comments since it will think someone new is commenting, but starting with this comment I’ll be using the active email address. So perhaps I’ll start actually getting your witty replies, or finding out for real that I get ignored.I’m about to post this. If it’s held for moderation, then I’ve never used this email addy with you. If it posts, it means I have and got approved sometime back, so using the dead one all this time was REALLY idiotic.
Here goes…
Well, that’s it GD, you are just going to have to sell the mansion and buy a one level bungalow mate.
Commiserations.