Recent injuries

I still have a small scar on my leg from when our dishwasher bit me a week or so ago. To tell the truth I cannot blame the machine itself as the injury would not have happened had I not got a text message from a friend who lives locally telling me that the aurora borealis was visible in the sky to the north of us.

Up to that point we were having a quiet evening, dinner was over with and bedtime wasn't too far away but on receipt of the message I took immediate action so that we could watch the spectacle ourselves. (This is our friend's picture, not ours.)

To anyone who has never seen the aurora I should explain that the coloured light that appears in the sky is not dazzlingly bright. In fact to see it at all you will need to be away from other sources of light. Street lights and external house lights really need to be absent to see it properly and unless you live in a remote light-free area your chances of seeing anything at all are very slim. Then there are the eyes. We humans do not generally have good night vision so we tend to live in an environment that is artificially lit at night and if we move quickly from a brightly lit place to somewhere dark then our eyes need time to adjust, our pupils expanding so as to let in what little light there is. Until this has happened we are almost blind.

But the aurora is worth seeing, so my first reaction after receiving my friend's message was to turn off all the lights inside our house, a perfectly natural thing to do. The problem was that at that moment Kate was emptying the dishwasher and on being plunged into darkness she left the kitchen to find out what was going on. Having explained my reasoning we agreed that our garden would give us the best opportunity to see the aurora and it was then that, whilst walking through the kitchen towards the back door, my shin made contact with the open door of the dishwasher. Ouch! I didn't see it because my eyes were still adjusting. Even once I had hobbled outside into the garden my vision was still impaired but fortunately I missed falling into the pond although there were a couple of stumbles into our raised flower beds.

Injury number two, a small cut on my arm, was incurred some days later whilst folding up our wallpaper pasting table. We'd been helping some friends out by wallpapering a bedroom with lining paper so that it can then be painted in colours to suit their young daughter's taste. Our pasting table is a heavy plastic thing which folds in the middle and needs wire stiffeners to stop it collapsing in use. I have no idea of how the injury occurred but noticed the red stuff leaking down my arm as we were packing up. Suffice to say that a plaster soon stopped this and I didn't need surgery. The folded pasting table is both heavy and awkward to carry, which probably explains how I managed to strain a muscle in my back whilst carrying the thing downstairs after we had finished papering. In future I shall treat the thing with much more respect since clearly it has it in for me and has a taste for my flesh.

Sometimes it is better to focus upon the injuries we have avoided rather than those incurred. I am thinking now of my recent adventure up onto the roof of the house when the chimney cowl needed replacing. I chose a calm, rain-free day for the job, mainly because I knew it would involve my standing on the peak next to the chimney, the highest point of  the roof.

The old cowl had disintegrated and the remaining bits had been flapping about in the wind for several weeks making a clanking noise that could be heard inside the house. By the time I got up onto the roof using an extending ladder, most of the cowl had blown down but I still had to remove the remaining pieces and throw these down into the garden before fitting the new one. All in all I thought it went rather well and I am happy to report that despite the recent strong winds it is still sitting up there on top of our chimney. What this does prove is that, statistically, climbing up on the roof is safer from injury than wallpapering. Who'd have thought that!

The most annoying little injuries we seem to attract are those caused by one or other of the plants we have growing in or around our garden, most of which have spikes which are just waiting for human skin to come their way. Gorse is a top contender along with bramble and both of these will leave tiny pieces buried under the skin that are difficult to remove but irritate constantly.

Beyond our back garden fence the land is wild and uncared for, a jungle of gorse and rhododendron.

Some of the gorse has grown tall as it tries to reach the light and after a long period of dry weather this creates a fire risk close to our boundary. Clumps of gorse's spiky leaves are highly inflammable things, particularly when they are dry as they contain volatile oils and flammable resins. To reduce the risk I have been cutting out as much of the gorse as I can. Some of the trunks are six inches thick and will end up as firewood once they are dry but the smaller twigs and gorse leaves will be burnt in various stages in our garden incinerator. My thick leather gloves protect my fingers as best they can from the spikes and also from the heat of the fire. Injury avoidance again.

Whilst engaged on the gorse cutting I could not help but notice a thing of quite amazing beauty that the plant hides within its stems. The close up shown here of a freshly cut gorse trunk reveals a pattern within the tight grain that deserves better recognition. This hidden feature is right beside us inside every plant and by chain-sawing through the stem I have revealed its innermost secret.