One Man and His Blog

Two hours ago, I thought I was about to lose everything I wanted.

Now, I’ve realised I’ve got back what I really wanted all along.

Actually, God isn’t just good – He’s amazing.

K has sorted me out with some crutches from her hospital, which should come in very useful, seeing as how I’m sure I’ve been standing up too much today.

In related news, I am currently sitting with my foot up adorned with a packet of frozen veg, and Chez is serenading me with a song to the tune of the Spider-Man theme, entitled "Veggie-Foot".

Bad things about having a sprained ankle:
Trying to get up the stairs.
Trying to get into the shower.
Trying to get out of the shower.
Trying to get down the stairs.
Walking at about a third of my normal speed.
Feeling I’m in people’s way.
Colleagues who do comedy limping as they walk past my desk.
Huge swelling of ankle.
Bright purple bruising all over foot.
Muscles in other leg aching from overuse.

Good things about having a sprained ankle:
Lots of sympathy.
Other people making cups of tea for you.
Kudos from colleagues for coming into work.
Free advice from an off duty physio.
Good-natured ribbing about the cause of the injury ("chasing after a woman, eh?!").

The swelling is nowhere near as big as it was yesterday, but my right foot is still about twice the size of my left. I’m being careful about not putting too much weight on it, and it has generally been much easier and less painful to get about today than it was yesterday. The bruising, however, is much worse than I was expecting. But K the physio has assured me it all looks quite nomal for this point in time, and it should all start to heal up OK in due course. And of course, when K heard that all this had come about because I was running to try and catch up with her… she laughed. Yeah, thanks for the sympathy there, mate…

Post deleted due to stupid link not working. Might try it again later. Or might forget about it.

As you were.

So, no blogging for a whole week – maybe I’ve been having a boring time of it? Oh no, my friends, if anything I’ve had so much going on that there hasn’t been much time to update. But there is much to tell you of the last week (well, a bit, anyway)…

Let’s start with the whole facebook fasting business – I haven’t cracked yet, although towards the end of the week I was quite tempted. Having a fairly busy week helped – if you only have an hour or so between getting home from work and going somewhere, you tend to find it easier to prioritise what does and doesn’t need doing. A quarter of the way through Lent, and all is well on that score.

Much of my busyness last week was down to the usual church stuff, cell groups (adult and youth) and so on, but I did get to go for a nice evening out on Thursday. One of my friends had come up with a rather nifty plan to get a huge crowd of us together – married, single and all points inbetween – and go out for a big all-inclusive meal on Valentine’s night, so the couples hoping for a romantic evening at their local tapas restaurant were instead confronted by a table of twenty making a nuisance of themselves. This was my first ever experience of both tapas and paella (I’ve had a sheltered upbringing, I know), and while I rather enjoyed them at the time, I was less enamoured with the bloated feeling and (readers of a nervous disposition, look away now) foul-smelling flatulence that woke me up around 2.20 in the morning. Still, overall, extremely good times.

There then followed a fairly chilled weekend, part of which was spent hanging out with our visitors. My housemate Chez has two brothers who both came to visit, and one brought his boyfriend along. The only problem is, Chez, her brothers and the boyfriend are all well over six foot tall, leaving 5′9" me feeling somewhat lowly when everybody stood up. After they’d gone on Sunday, I headed out to the cinema with some friends and saw There Will Be Blood, which I really enjoyed (although it’s not an easy watch, and is very intense and heavy at times), then headed to the pub for a pint with Me Mate Dave before coming home.

And then there’s today. It started like any other Monday – a feeling of, "oh, here we go again", reluctantly forcing myself up and out of the house. And then, on the way to the train station, the adventure started. As I was near the top of a road, I saw my friend K walk past the end; figuring I could catch her up before the pedestrian crossing round the corner, I put a sprint on. And then, after about three steps, I fell flat on my face. I don’t know if there was some ice around or if my ankle just gave way, but it was very painful and hard to walk on. I weighed up whether to go to the doctor straight away or struggle on into work and, rightly or wrongly, went for the second option. Having limped to the station, I got on the train, then started to feel like I was going to black out as we arrived in town. I quickly got myself off the train and into a conveniently-placed waiting room, stuck my head between my knees for a couple of minutes, and then limped on manfully up a flight of steps, up a hill, down a ramp and across a courtyard into my office, wherein I removed my shoe and sock to assess the damage. It was even more swollen than I’d expected; it appeared to be at least twice its usual size. And it was really really bloody agonising by now.

I was packed off into the office rest room (not the same as a "restroom" in the American sense, this is more like a basic kitchen with some space to sit and relax during breaks) with my foot up on a table and a plentiful supply of water and paracetamol being passed my way. A couple of minutes later, my manager arrived and immediately decided I should head off to our nearest hospital to have it checked out. A taxi was sent for, and within a few minutes I was hobbling into A&E.

Well, to cut an already overlong story short, after much looking over and four x-rays, they came to the conclusion it’s a particularly nasty sprain. Ibuprofen, ice and elevation are the order of the day. I phoned my manager, who suggested I should go home and rest it; I agreed, and then wondered how I was going to get home from the other side of town (walking was probably out of the question). Thanks to a self-employed friend, I was soon hopping about in my own house, negotiating all the suddenly-much-more-complicated things like getting up the stairs to the loo, actually using the loo, getting back down the stairs after using the loo, etc etc.

Anyways, I’ll be trying to get myself in and out of work on the bus tomorrow (two minutes’ walk from my house compared with fifteen for the train, and no steps to contend with on the way either), and all being well I should be back to normal – well, as normal as I’ve ever been – in two or three weeks. In the meantime, if you’re in the Birmingham area and suddenly hear a pained "AAAAAAARRGGH!!", it’s probably just me putting a little too much weight on the offending ankle. Oh what fun…

Well, I should probably update you on some things, starting of course with the whole facebook fast malarkey. It’s been quite tough already, and in some ways it probably didn’t help that I took advantage of the "Sundays off" nature of Lent yesterday, as now I’ve remembered what I was missing. But I’m determined to keep going with it. Hopefully this week, I’ll manage to convert my non-facebook time into prayer and Bible reading and all that stuff I was intending to do with it, rather than just surfing other bits of the internet instead, which is pretty much what I ended up doing while I had some time off at the end of last week (I also got a MySpace page a few months ago, which I’ve barely looked at in weeks, but have suddenly found quite fascinating in the last few days, which wasn’t really the idea, eh?). So hopefully it’ll all go a bit better this week.

Not that I did a great deal with my time off, other than go to see my mate playing a gig in a pub (he was very good). But the weekend was much busier – drinks and a curry on Saturday, and a big lunch, a walk in the hills, drinks and a curry on Sunday. (Oh, and in case Alanis Morissette is reading this – not only were we not allowed to take a dog into a pub called The Dog, but we also parked outside a restaurant called Popular Tandoori House which had no customers inside. That’s irony, love.)

And today? Well, I’ve been back to work, smashed a cup, walked around town for ages after work failing to buy a shirt, encouraged a friend, and then was reassured by one of my housemates that it was fine to have encouraged said friend without thinking about the ulterior motive I have in the whole process…

Anyway, time to go and not look at facebook… Ta-ra.

I’ve just seen an online advert offering "two for one on Valentine’s cards". I never thought the bigamist market was that sustainable myself, but I guess it must be…

So, here we are, it’s Lent again, and whereas in the past I’ve struggled to think what I could give up (most years I’ve either given up nothing, which was very easy indeed, or given up chocolate, which was much more difficult), I’m in no doubt this year. So, in just a few hours, I shall be giving up Facebook for Lent.

It’s a no-brainer really. For all its usefulness for keeping in touch with people and the fun factor, I know I can all too easily waste hours sitting there seeing that nothing’s happened, no one’s online and nothing’s changed since two minutes ago. So for the next seven weeks I’m going to aim to use those hours more productively.

Of course, my main aim for Lent will be using much of the non-Facebook time to spend with God, and to maybe read a book or two which could come in handy. However, I suspect that a side effect will be that I spend more time blogging stuff, whether it needs blogging or not.

So will I make it through? We shall see. I’m working on the western Christianity model of Lent, wherein the 40 days don’t include Sundays, so I’ll probably still spend a couple of hours on there each week – but at least that’s a couple of hours per week, not per day, and it will be confined to a short space of time. Meanwhile, I suspect the biggest temptation is going to be checking my emails and seeing all those notifications that they send you – you know, "James sent you a message", "Laura invited you to an event", "Brian sneezed within three miles of you" and all that – and resisting the urge to go and investigate them straight away.

The thing is, just lately, it’s felt a lot like God’s doing some stuff with me, and that’s been great. But it’s also felt like I’ve been having trouble making time to actually spend with Him getting to grips with what He’s doing and what I ought to do as a result. So hopefully that’s all going to change.

Finally, rather than trying to explain all this at length on my Facebook page, I’ve just linked here – so if you’re reading this for the first time, welcome to my blog. Put your feet up and make yourself at home. Please sign the guest book (i.e. click the number next to the question mark and leave a comment) or lurk to your heart’s content. And maybe click the thing at the top that says, "powered by www.wibsite.com", and read some of the other stuff here. Or, just maybe, turn your computer off and go and do something else. That’s kind of what I’m doing.

Wished my dad a happy birthday.
Made a joke with one of my colleagues which she didn’t find funny.
Ate a free pancake courtesy of Little Chef.
Held my tongue.
Heard some news which was both good and bad at the same time.
Tried on a wig that made me look like Axl Rose.
Gave a compliment.
Improvised some jazz.
Phoned someone whose reaction was, "oh God, not you again".
Planned ahead.

When I first left home, I relished the fact that I no longer had my mum suggesting I get my hair cut every couple of months, and decided to let it grow and see what happened. What happened was that it all grew into some big bowly helmet-headed mess, leaving me resembling all of the Beatles circa 1963. So after about seven months or so, I decided to get it trimmed up a bit and went looking for my local barber’s; turned out it was just a few minutes from my house.

I never returned to that particular hairdresser’s shop again; partly because of the crap haircut I got, but also because of the staff’s attitude to the small child having his hair cut before me. He was obviously not happy, and kept wriggling and squirming, despite his mum’s best efforts to keep him still. When it was all done, mother and child left the shop; following which the staff proceeded to complain about what an annoying little sod he was and how unhelpful they thought his mother had been. If I was the sort of person who feels able to tell people what I’m thinking without worrying about their reaction, I would have laid into them big time. But I’m not, so I didn’t.

The next time I needed a trim, I went to a salon up the road recommended to me by my then-housemate; it’s the same one I’ve gone back to ever since. And lo and behold, when I went in there yesterday it was all a bit deja vu. For one thing, I’m growing my hair out again, and for another there was a small child crying and dribbling at having his hair cut. But what a different attitude from the hairdresser here. He called the child by his name and spoke to him calmly, trying to reason that if the young lad kept wriggling, there was a chance he might accidentally get his ear cut off. He encouraged the boy to stay still, with dad holding his head to one side or the other, and eventually finished the cut and was really reassuring to both father and son. After they’d left, another waiting customer commented on what hard work it had looked. The hairdresser’s reaction? "Nah, just another day at the office."

I was so impressed, I just wanted to mention it. Well done Frank (the encouraging hairdresser), my custom is secured with you for the foreseeable future.