Breaking stuff – not so cool

I’ve spent quite a lot of time recently just slouching about the house, having broken my wrist. In some ways it’s quite nice, but there is nothing like temporary disability to make you appreciate what most of us take for granted every day. The most banal flicks of the hand are either impossible or very inelegant. I can open a bottle of coke with my teeth, and a jar of coffee by holding it between my feet.

When I got some soup for lunch in Pret, I had to ask the man next to me to take the lid off for me. It’s certainly an easy way to strike up a conversation, and it makes for lots of amusing moments — like when the man whom I asked to open my bottle of Diet Coke, who was sitting with either a colleague or a client he clearly didn’t know very well, said “Now I’ll be really embarrassed if I can’t do it”.

I sit at work typing with one hand all day, and had to enable the “sticky keys” feature that allows you to press ctrl+alt+del separately. Made me feel like a right muppet.

At the more irritating end of the spectrum, some people feel the need to say things like “That didn’t work out so well, huh”, when I’d just come out of the hospital with the cast. Thanks for that, Sherlock, I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. When I told this helpful American that I had fallen off my bike he expressed absolute amazement, saying it was the second person he’d spoken to that day with the same injury. He had obviously missed the fact that the Hilton Paddington he was staying in is right opposite the hospital.