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Playing football last Friday I broke the little finger of my left hand. The bone has also twisted, meaning that I might need surgery to straighten it. This means my left hand is more or less useless. Just living simply becomes a chore. Anything involving water is particularly tough, the hardest two tasks are washing up and shampooing my hair. But more or less every activity involves both hands, I have sadly discovered.

Getting dressed, cleaning the house, cooking, drumming, typing, playing football, digging the allotment. All these things are either tough or basically off the menu, and as I live on my own at the moment I don’t have anyone to help me make them any easier. ‘I foresaw a winter of working on my book Blakes Road. I was going to lay the floor in my shed and remove a lot of the bindweed from my allotment. I was hoping to practice my drums whenever possible.

None of that’s going to happen now. All the time I have I need for the two handed tasks I can just about undertake, with one hand at half the speed, which is pretty much just working & maintaining the house.

I can still manage zero & one handed tasks though. I can read, write, draw & go for walks. So the agenda for this winter has been radically changed. Instead of writing my book, I am going to pick up my sketchbook again, get back to writing letters to old friends, read more, and go for walks. Something I always had half a mind to do was to make Blakes Road an illuminated book, like Blake himself did with his books, so if I can bring my drawing abilities back upto the level they once were, I should be able to do that and therefore produce a much more interesting piece of work.

This episode has also reminded me that one needs friends at times like these, and that’s something I have neglecting of late, forgetting to stay in touch with people. Friendships take work, and are easily lost. It strikes me that I have been spending too much time with people on the basis of what they do, and not who they are, which is a bit weird quite honestly.

Tags: Blakes Road

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 12:22 pm and is filed under books, drawing, news, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.