Being Under Siege.

The blog is troubling me lately, and the reason it’s troubling me is that I have so little to say to it. There are several reasons for that, but the main one is that I’ve been under siege for the past ten weeks. I mustn’t do anything even lightly strenuous, they tell me. I mustn’t even drive a car.

Well, as you might expect, I do engage with a few activities which might be described as lightly strenuous – including driving a car short distances – but then I suffer for it later. It isn’t the suffering that bothers me, though; I can live with a bit of pain and discomfort. It’s the fear that I might be doing some damage or at least causing the healing process to become protracted. ‘Six to twelve months,’ they told me. That’s a bloody long time. Meanwhile, the house is becoming a hovel, the garden a jungle, and the sight of them is driving me scatty.

So how do I distract myself? TV? Nope; hardly anything there worth watching. Reading? Nope; my attention span lasts about ten to fifteen minutes and then the book becomes an object of faded regard and goes back on the shelf. YouTube? That’s a help, but only after midnight. I have restricted bandwidth, you see, for cheapness, so I can only allow myself the luxury of streaming between midnight and 8am. Walking? Yes, but I don’t have my normal energy levels back yet so I’m restricted to around 1-1½ miles. It doesn’t take very long to walk that far.

And so I live mostly in my head, imagining things I would like to happen but almost certainly won’t. There are a few special people, for example, who I would like to come and visit me, but they either don’t have transport, are too busy, or are disinclined so to do. And the fact of my having discouraged social visitors as an unwarranted intrusion for several years probably doesn’t help much. But the truth is that I’m becoming increasingly fed up and frustrated and my need of a relief column to come and lift the siege is verging on desperation.

And yet there is cause for hope. I talked briefly to a woman in the lane today and I’ll tell you what she said to me (even though it’s unlikely to be believed) because it’s something I’ve never been told before. She told me that I’m not a good looking sort of chap (which I certainly have been told before) but that my face has a ‘craggy’ look which some women find attractive. Really? A craggy look? Hmm… In that case all I have to do is enlist a regiment of young women who like the craggy look and my problems will be over at a stroke. (I am joking, of course, for how would I accommodate a regiment of craggy look enthusiasts in my present condition?)

But what else can I do but dream and joke when I’m barred from doing anything which is even lightly strenuous? And what do I say to the blog when I’m living in my head imagining things that haven’t happened and almost certainly never will?