David W. Robinson's Blog: Always Writing, page 11

What’s It All About, Arfur?

Well, it’s about me, to be honest.

If I go back ten years I was as fit and healthy as any other man my age, albeit overweight and smoking too much. Then I got a lodger. Arfur. He moved into my knee and he’s been with me ever since. Not only that, but he’s spread out and is now encamped in almost every joint in my crumbling frame.

The story of how he crept into my life and took roots is the running theme of the book, Life With Arfur, naturally, it’s told with a tongue in cheek approach because that, as I keep reminding you, is my chief weapon against arthritis.

Just to whet your appetite, check out this video of me reading a short passage from the book, concentrating on the arthritic knee. I’ll apologise in advance for the quality. I use natural lighting on my videos and the weather was poor which meant I had to enhance the movie with an overhead light.

 

The book is like that practically the whole way through.

Why do I make light of it when in reality it’s a serious and debilitating problem? Precisely because it is a serious and debilitating problem. What is the alternative to maintaining my sense of humour? Spending my life griping about it won’t make it go away.

Should I give in? Yesterday, I talked about the way poor Joe, our nutjob Jack Russell fell off the settee and hurt himself. Has he given in? Nope. He just barks at the postman from the carpet because he can’t get on the seat by the window.

I compare my life as it is to what it was and what I thought it might be and ask questions. At what stage did tubular support bandage become a higher priority than razor blades? What happened to me that should make me prefer Velcro straps to shoelaces? How did I ever get to the stage where I have to use a bizarrely-shaped piece of cardboard to put my socks on?

The ingredients of a tragedy? Or a comedy?

Life With Arfur is published by Crooked Cat Books in the summer

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Life With Arfur – The Book

Exciting is at fever pitch in the Robinson household. My publisher, Crooked Cat Books, is branching into non-fiction and my book, Life With Arfur, will be one of the first two published under the True Cats line. The other will be Pensioners in Paradis by Olga Swan. Life With Arfur is expected to appear in paperback and e-book sometime around June.

I signed contracts for the book yesterday afternoon and the formal announcement was made on Facebook later in the evening.

It couldn’t have come at a better time. I’ve had the weekend from hell again. My ankle will not settle down, and while we were out trailing round shops buying bits and pieces I’m not sure we needed – since when does a bobbin of black cotton cost £1.20 and does anyone buy bobbins of cotton these days – Joe was left at home and he fell off the settee and injured himself.

It’s not the first time he’s done it and we know what causes it. He sleeps on his back sometimes, and if he’s laid along the seats and then rolls over in the wrong direction, he rolls off and drops to the floor. That’s just what he did on Saturday and it left him pain when it was too late to get him to the vet.

We were going to take him Sunday morning, but he rallied overnight, and after polishing off a full sausage, part of my bacon sandwich, and two small pieces of ginger cake…. Oh, and half a tin of dog food, he was walking fine, so we didn’t bother.

Come Monday morning, he was hobbling again, so we took him to the vet, who gave us the definitive diagnosis. Some bruising to his back, but otherwise okay. Right now he’s kipped out on the settee again. I tell you, this dog is two planks short of a full kennel.

So between my ankle, the dog and a change in the weather that has aggravated the arthritis in both knees and both shoulders, I could have done without the renewal quote for the car insurance landing on the doormat.

It’s a sporty, 1.7 diesel Vauxhall Corsa, which begs the question, why am I being quoted for the Battleship Potemkin? Touch wood, cross fingers, I’ve never claimed on car insurance in forty years. Why, then, do I get stuffed every year? It’s gone up 17.5% this year. How does that sit with inflation figures of less than 2%? The word ‘shafted’ springs to mind, but shopping around, I find it’s still one of the lowest quotes.

By one o’clock this afternoon, I was on a low ebb. My ankle was screaming, my knees were griping, the dog was moaning and I was grumbling, and my temper was simmering on gas mark 7.

The cavalry came over the hill in the shape of Crooked Cat’s email at a quarter to three, offering me a contract for Life With Arfur.

So what’s the book all about?

The title should give you a cue, but I’ll tell you tomorrow.

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The Ankle: Three Weeks On

Wanna know where all the rain is coming from? It’s my fault. I’ve been spending money.

Yesterday, wandering round the shops in town, I’d had enough of the pain and soreness in my right ankle, so I dug into my thruppenny bit jar and forked out £16.50 for an ankle support. The pain of parting with that amount was almost as bad as the pain from the ankle itself, but the need to minimise this maddening, won’t-go-away ache outweighed the need to keep the Oxo tin full.

Does it work? Hell, yes. You can see the soreness under the ankle, and the joint itself grumbles a bit when I put it on, but I’m okay with that. The wife grumbles no matter what I do, so I’ve developed an immunity to constant griping. It’s pain I can’t deal with.

And when I put my crap, dog-walking shoes on, it looks as if it’s still badly swollen, but it isn’t. The support takes up more room than my socks in the same way that the missus takes up more room than me.

It’s hard to believe that three weeks have passed since I fell in the garden and did the ankle in. To me it seems like yesterday. I can clearly remember the universe spinning above me; an effect I usually get only when I’m drunk. But blasted out of your brains on Newcastle Brown Ale doesn’t cause any obvious injuries.

You don’t believe me? I’ll prove it. I was at a wedding do back in the late nineties. Top room of Nimble Nook Club. Tanked up on Boddington’s bitter, I needed the smallest room, which was downstairs. I slipped on the top step and came tumbling down like the walls of Jericho. Not a mark on me. One slip in the back garden and I’m hobbling along like a 19th century prisoner without the manacles.

The support virtually immobilises the ankle and true to its description, provides support when I’m walking as well as resting. I had one on my wrist about 15 years ago, when I broke it, and it was great, although that one did make holding a knife and fork difficult, and the missus complained that after eight weeks in place, it began to stink… or was it me that began to stink after eight weeks in place? I can’t remember.

So I’m getting around a little better and the ankle will, hopefully, heal a bit quicker.

Arfur has taken this opportunity to get his jollies. My right knee, which is bearing the brunt of hassle from the ligaments, is now humming in tune to the ankle, but his music is a sort of descant. The ankle hurts and Arfur is part of the choir, I rest, and Arfur gets the opportunity for a solo.

Her Indoors reckons I deserve it for being such a bad bugger all my life. Now that’s adding insult to injury.

What the support has helped me do is work. Wearing this strap on my foot, I’m able to get at the word processor and get on with those projects I need to move forward. If nothing else, a couple of new books are making progress.

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Arthritis at the Movies

We all know that arthritis can get at almost anyone. So how come I don’t see our movie heroes suffering? I mean, all that fighting and scrapping, rolling round in the damp grass, must take its toll on them, but you never see it, do you?

Just before we find out, as well as reading it, you can watch this next bit complete with rubbish impersonations. Trust me, you will want to see this. My impressions of movie stars are so bad, they’re almost good.

So how would our movie heroes deal with arthritis?

Bond, of course, would handle it with his usual panache. Manacled to the table, the laser beam making its way up between his legs, can’t you just see him throwing out one of his famous quips? “Oh while you have that laser switched on, Goldfinger, any chance you could work on my knee ligaments?”

Dirty Harry might have to clean up his act. He’d deliver that famous Eastwood scowl, aim his Magnum forty-four and warn Andy Robinson not to go for his gun. “I know what you’re thinking, punk? Has he had two hip replacements or only one?”

Having your own mob is no guarantee. But Don Corleone could demonstrate his more sympathetic side. “I’m a reasonable man. I’m willing to do whatever’s necessary to ease your ankylosing spondulytis.”

Would magic be any proof against arthritis? I don’t think so. It’s Potter vs Voldemort, and voldie is winning, so what does Potter do? Well if he’s any sense, he legs it, with Voldemort’s words ringing in his ear. “Go on, Potter. Run away like the coward that you are. You know damn well my spells don’t work until I’ve had physio on my tennis elbow.”

This disease is so intractable there’s no guarantee of ever finding a cure. Not even in a galaxy, far, far away where a trembling officer confesses that the rebels have escaped, and faces the wrath of Darth Vader. “Fortunately for you, commander, my carpal tunnel syndrome is playing up so I can’t throttle you. Don’t let it happen again.”

We don’t even know that bio-mechanics will be any solution. According to Kyle Rees in the Terminator, the cyborgs are part robot, part human. So will this make them susceptible to arthritis? In the remake of Terminator two when Arnie is protecting Connor from the T-1,000, will we hear him say, “Run, John. I’ll hold him up… just as soon as I’ve rubbed glucosamine and chondroitin into my joints.”

Come on, movieland. Let’s have bit of reality in these epics.

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An Offline Short, Long Walk

A brief account of switching ISPs and walking the dog while suffering from a manky ankle

 

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Switching

I’m changing ISPs, and tomorrow, this:

Will become this:

I’m likely to be offline for a time. Did I hear a cheer go up?

I wouldn’t want you to think I’m dissatisfied with my current provider. I’m not. I’ve been with them a good few years and they’ve been pretty reliable. But if I’m not unhappy with the service, I’m deliriously chuffed off with the bills. Their price hikes are scandalous and in the last two years my bill has increased by about 25%.

I’m not going to name them. They don’t carry ads for my books. Likewise, I’m not going to name the new provider. They won’t carry adverts for my books, either.

One of the major factors in the change was colour of the router. It blends rather than contrasts with the background décor.

This was a weak attempt to make you smile, but in fact, colour schemes are often at the forefront of my wife’s thinking. No one was happier than Her Indoors when the red kettle burned out and she could replace it with one in a more decorous white. Her biggest objection to my sock-puller is that it’s blue.

I’m convinced that Joe knew what he was doing when he decided to turn up in white with black patches. No matter what ma’am’s flavour of the month colour-wise, he still blends in. He spends most of his time spark out, glued to the settee, but his colour-coding ensures that he can still be seen and he doesn’t disturb the variable tenor of the missus’s aesthetic tastes.

To get back to the main thrust of this post, what will I do for the time I’m offline? Being arthritic and retired means I spend a lot of time faffing on the web, and to be cut off, even for a short period of time, is like social ostracism.

I’ll probably spend it writing. After all, you’ll be dying to learn how excellent/good/ poor/disastrous the changeover goes, won’t you? And even if you’re not, I’ll tell you.

And I do have other work in hand. It’s almost two years since the last Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery appeared, it’s eighteen months since I last put out a new title of any description, and I have projects in hand that really need working on.

I could use my smartphone to log on… but I’m fussy about that. Call me odd, but I bought it to make phone calls and I don’t understand how all the other bits and pieces, internet access and what have you, work.

Alternatively, lacking any serious internet access, I could just jump in the car and go to the supermarket for a loaf of bread.

 

Arthritis: Dreading A Fall

When you suffer with arthritis, the one thing you dread more than anything else is a fall. All right, so it’s the one thing I dread. You might have other horrors which preoccupy you.

Y’see, your joints are already on the way to the scrapyard, so if you fall and injure yourself, you’re just going to do even more damage. With that in mind, I’m careful going up and down stairs, walking on ice and snow, crossing the kitchen floor after the missus has done mopping it.

But I never thought about the garden.

Backtrack two weeks, and Joe, our crackpot Jack Russell was in an out of the garden all day, and every time he came in, he dragged a field of mud with him. So we set about laying bark chippings on the worst of the mud. We’ve done it before and as a temporary solution, it’ll do until the drier weather comes and we can re-seed the grass.

Our garden slopes towards the house. I’m coming back that way when I slipped on a mudslide and went down. My right leg shot out at an angle, the world spun crazily above me, my foot twisted and bang went my ankle.

You can watch a summary of it below.

 

After a screaming fit which had the neighbours complaining about my language (again), I hobbled into the house and stripped off my mud-soaked clothes in the kitchen. This brought a fresh howl of complaint from the neighbours who had their binoculars, cameras, sound booms, etc. trained on the bedroom.

After telling them to get their kicks elsewhere before I kicked them, I examined the busted ankle. Nothing broken. A bad sprain. I wouldn’t be kicking anyone for a while.

But it was on my right foot which, from an arthritis point of view, is the worst one. By the time I’d had a calming cuppa and a calming cigarette (I’ve always been able to prioritise) the pain was already making its way up my leg to my knee.

Twenty-four hours on, the ankle felt quite strong. It could bear my weight, but the strain on my right leg was intolerable.

Two weeks on, it’s getting better, but I’m still limping like Long John Silver minus parrot. Mind, it didn’t help when Her Indoors rattled it with a supermarket trolley cos she was not watching where she was going. The air turned blue and that’s another supermarket I’m banned from.

I pass a lot of time with my foot raised, but the ligaments and other gubbins in there, and especially my knee are throbbing. If I could get other appendages to throb like that… well, I don’t need to draw you a diagram, do I?

The leg needs a lot of support. A bit like Oldham Athletic, but without the noise. As I write, I’m wearing an elastic stocking from foot to above the knee. And I’m sorry guys, but there are no suspenders or frilly knickers attached to the stocking.

I gave up wearing them after finally admitting that the pair the missus found in my pocket were not mine. I was looking after them for my mate Jim’s wife.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Changes coming This Way

Come the end of the month, this site will undergo major changes. Most of the present content will be stripped out and replaced and the emphasis will change.

It will also be retitled, Life With Arfur.

Arfur? Arfur-Eyetis that is.

I suffer from osteoarthritis, and as I get older it’s getting worse. It now affects most of the joints in my crumbling body. But I have a secret weapon. Humour.

It’s all too easy to sit around moaning, groaning and moping cos you’re in pain all the time. I do enough moaning, groaning and moping on the size of the gas bill, but it doesn’t make the gas bill go away. And similarly, all the whinging in the world won’t make pain go away. So I have a chuckle at it.

Trust me, arthritis is no laughing matter. The aching joints nag worse than the missus when she wants the drains clearing. And when my knees start clicking, I’ve seen many a wannabe flamenco dancer get to his/her feet.

But the wife stops nagging when I clear the drains, and the drunken flamenco dancers sit down when everyone boos them. Arfur never stops. He will not go away.

So what prompted the change of plan? Two things. First, a call from my publisher, Crooked Cat Books, for something different. As it happens, I had a volume entitled Life With Arfur, so I sent it off to them. This is not a guarantee that they will accept and publish it.

The second thing was an incident in our back garden last week. It’s all right, madam, you can carry on reading. I wasn’t dancing naked round the apple tree. There was no full moon.

Pottering in the garden I slipped. My leg shot out sideways and my ankle twisted. It’s a bad sprain, but a week and half down the line, it still hurts like hell. We’re back in drain-cleaning, flamenco-dancing territory.

These two events conspired to make me change the site.

What can you expect?

Humour. Well that goes without saying. (If it goes without saying, why am I saying it?)

Advice. In a half-arsed sort of way. Well-intentioned suggestions for coping with Arfur, all hedged with a shade of humour.

Aids. No, madam, we’re not talking about quick trip to Ann Summers. We’re talking simple things like sock pullers and grabbers. And by grabbers, I don’t mean your friendly, neighbourhood groper, I mean things like this:

There will be a combination of posts, podcasts and videos, and as an example, here’s one I made earlier concerning the aforementioned sock-puller.

 

That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

DISCLAIMER

I’m not a doctor. I’m not a nurse. Hell, I even failed First Aid. According to the instructor, the amount of pressure I put on Resusci Anne’s chest the CPR would be a waste of time. She’d have died of crush injuries at my hands.

I do not give medical advice, but I can give common sense advice.

If you start to suffer with any kind of joint pain, SEE YOUR DOCTOR. Don’t listen to your mates in the pub advising you to stop being so idle and get to the gym. Don’t listen to old Mrs Shufflebottom down the street. Dancing naked round the apple tree under a full moon might work, but it’s just as likely to get you arrested. SEE YOUR DOCTOR. He or she is the one who knows.

And when you’ve done that, then come here and learn how to laugh at Arfur.

You’re welcome to subscribe to the blog, to my YouTube channel, and at some point I will set up a newsletter and invite you to subscribe to that. But gimme a break. I can only do so much at one time and I have to nip to the shops shortly to buy ciggies before the budget price hike kicks in.

 

I Hate Christmas

Christmas is coming and me dad’s run outta fags

Please put a tenner in me mam’s handbag

If you haven’t got a tenner, a fiver will do

If you haven’t got a fiver, your window’s going through

Have I ever said that I hate Christmas?

It’s not just the expense, although that’s enough to give any sane man a coronary. It’s the entire thing.

Peace and goodwill to all men? Does that include the prat two doors down who threatened nuclear retaliation because his wife’s washing got mucked up during the summer? I meanersay, that fire was accidental. It’s not like I thought, “Hey up, she’s hung her washing out, time to torch the barbie.”

Her Indoors and me visit both her sisters, one on Christmas Day, the other on New Year’s Day. It’s very nice seeing the family but it grows every year as some youngster turns up with fresh brats in tow, and I don’t know half of ’em. Look at the time I was chatting to young Lucy. I’d been rabbiting to her for ten minute before the missus told me her name was Charlotte. We don’t even have a Lucy in the family.

And I always get lumbered with the party bore. It’s usually some loud-mouthed dipstick who’s determined to put me to sleep telling me all about his new car.

“Take a look at it and eat your heart out, buddy,” one of them said when bragging on his new 4×4. “Four litre petrol, 0-60 in seven seconds, does eighteen to the gallon and enough room for me and the Pussycat Dolls. Can you imagine how good I look in it?”

Shallow? You’d need an industrial sander to get any kind of depth to him.

I pointed to my ageing, battered Ford Ka. “1.3 litre petrol, 0-60 in three hours, does 35 to the gallon round town, there isn’t room for Her Indoors’ pussy never mind her dolls and it’ll still be going when that converted plumber’s van of yours has been repossessed.”

The wife’s other sister runs a riding school and inevitably there’s a cast of thousands at her farmhouse every New Year. Never slow to give offence, when one woman asked, “Are you at all horsey, David?” I replied, “I saddled a fair few fillies when I was younger, and I’m sure you were one of them.”

She went off in a huff and I distinctly heard her asked who that, “offensive old bastard in the kitchen was.”

I recall one girl asking, “What do you do for a living, sir?”

“Don’t call me, ‘sir’,” I ordered. “I’m not an officer and I’m certainly not a gentleman. And if you wanna know what I do, I write songs.”

She got all giggly and excited. “Really? Give us an example.”

An air of anticipatory silence fell over the room as I tuned up my grumbling baritone rasp.

Good king Wenceslas looked out

Of his bedroom window

Silly bugger he fell out

On a red hot cinder

Brightly shone his arse that night

Like a crimson jewel

Til he sat in drifting snow

And let his backside coo –oo -l

The moment I’d finished, half the room went online to see if they could download the mp3.

It’s Christmas, y’see. They hand their brains in with their credit cards.

The Ongoing Saga of Joe’s Eye

You all know Joe. You should do. He’s mentioned on here often enough and he photobombs more of my videos than is good for my sanity.

He’s a rescue dog. Found wandering the streets of Manchester, we rescued him from the dog’s home to give him a good home. He came with two problems: pneumonia and recurrent conjunctivitis. A bit of TLC put both right. Mind, the antibiotics helped.

The eye problem keeps on happening and now and again it gets ulcerated. It did last week and as a result, he’s back in a cone.

Sedated and his eye scraped on Monday, we took him back to the vet’s last night and he’s improving but not quite there. At least two more appointments.

Having been cut to the quick by losing an expensive compact camera and an mp3 player a couple of weeks back, I could live without massive vet bills, but what can you do?

Does Joe care about the money? Does he hell as like. He now walks with head up because if he has his head down, the cone hits everything including the ground. The tail still wags, the world is still his to conquer, and his appetite hasn’t suffered either.

But the worst thing is the noise. He’s a barker. Always has been. A noisy little bugger. And the cone acts as a megaphone. I’m very hard of hearing, but the racket of his barking through the cone makes my head spin.

So I’m leaking cash, I have to contend with a dumb dog who can’t judge where thing are thanks to his cone, and the noise he makes is giving me a permanent bloody headache.

I need another life

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