Friday 11 November 2011
It’s Friday night, I have one of these and am listening to this. Yesterday was always going to be busy - a full day’s work while builders were replacing windows in the house, followed by a school parents’ night – but it’s when a day has too many things in it already that it can get further out of control. Having to get my bike past the builders’ van in the drive to leave the house in the morning meant having it lifted to me over the front hedge, which was quite entertaining, and it wasn’t until I was cycling merrily along Highburgh Road that I realised I’d left my helmet behind. Oh well, had better ride carefully.
The afternoon included an eventful Performance class at the university, where at one point everyone was convinced that Handel’s Semele sings (in Endless Pleasure) ‘in her arms his balls reclining’, and the entire room was reduced to helpless laughter. Then on my way home a pedestrian walked through some stationary traffic without bothering to check whether a cyclist complete with bright yellow reflective jacket and blinding headlight (me) might be in the cycle lane. Yell, brake, crash. I remember flying through the air thinking ‘this could have been much worse, I think I’m going to land quite safely’, but six hours later when I finally had time to sit down I realised that I was in quite a lot of pain and my left thumb still wasn’t working at all.
However, thanks to the joys of the NHS, I left the house on foot at 10 this morning, and by 12 I had shown my hands to my GP (and had an interesting chat about Percy Grainger and Kathryn Tickell), been to the hospital for an X-ray, and was sitting in the University Café with a fish supper before picking up some Ibuprofen gel on the way to my one o’clock meeting. My left hand still isn’t working properly but it is improving, and I’m seeing another GP who knows all about these things on Thursday, to check that I’m not doing anything stupid with it. The bike seems to have survived fine of course, although I had to ride home with the handlebars at an angle, and the new Ortlieb pannier stayed steadfastly attached to the rack throughout the whole sorry business. And I was wearing these: I would absolutely never get on a bike for more than a few seconds without wearing good gloves. My only visible trophy injury is a slightly grazed knee.
Then I had a very interesting afternoon today in conversations about the 18th century Scottish flute, bagpipes and Romanticism, the motivations of the historical performance movement (with John Butt), vocal registers in baroque treatises, and how conservatoires teach singing. Whew. Let’s see how much my hands hurt tomorrow.