A Sorry Tale of a Broken Arm by Dr Paul Carter

by Dr Paul Carter

 

 

One minute Gilly and I were happily gardening together, chatting about grafting techniques and soil pH, as gardeners do, and the next minute she was gone. I had glanced down to place a gooseberry bush in the hole I had just dug, and when I looked up, it was only to find that I was on my own. She had vanished into thin air.

I stood up and looked around, but without being any the wiser about the cause of her disappearance. I was starting to think that maybe she had slid through a wormhole into a parallel universe when I heard a faint cry of help from the bottom of the hawthorn hedge. I ran over to where the garden falls away steeply, and there she was lying at the bottom of the slope, firmly entangled in the hedge and lying on a Fakir’s bed of recently pruned spiky cuttings.

Although we worked together as a team, getting her out was no easy matter. Eventually, however, the hedge released its grip on her, and Gilly sat on the lawn above the slope, pulling a hundred thorns out of her bum and arm and telling me that her wrist hurt. From the swelling and the bruising, the wrist was always going to be broken, and that is exactly what the x-rays showed. 

By unlucky chance, on the very same day that Gilly fell over and broke her arm, and without so much as a by-your-leave, the fairy who looks so beautifully after our house, also disappeared. So that, on top of fussing over my poorly wife, I was now faced with all the domestic stuff as well. 

But I am not really complaining, because it’s turning out to be a fair bit easier than I had initially imagined. It is early days as yet, of course, but after looking a bit scruffy for a day or so, the house is once again looking much better now that I have shown Gilly how to use the vacuum cleaner, make the bed, and load and unload the dishwasher one-handed.  

Cooking was a little trickier, but I have given Gilly a copy of my second book and shown her some simple easy recipes that I don’t think will overtax her.  But just in case anyone thinks I am not pulling my weight, and having last night now found out where the fridge is, I chipped in with bangers and mash. It tasted okay, but something went wrong with my estimation of how much mash two people can eat, and there is now enough of it stored away to last the pair of us clear through to the American election.

But although Gilly is getting good at doing most things one-handed, she does sometimes struggle a bit, especially with the laundry. There are times when I find it quite uncomfortable to watch her, and I can’t wait for that fairy to get back from wherever it is she shot off to.