Ouch!

I have spent the entire day in bed, trying to find a lying down position that was not agony. It started the night before with another session of tile laying (these stop when I get too tired to be confident in my straight-edge ability). The session was followed by a visit, and this visitor and I shared BrewDog’s Punk IPA, Dead Pony and Fake Lager. All very nice indeed, and all the nicer because Aldi sell them at 50p less per bottle than Tesco, so I bought two of each.

This particular visitor likes to visit at night because of the bats. He is convinced they congregate over my garden, but I’m sure it’s just coincidentally on every local bat’s flight path. Then there are the spiders – he claims that the two biggest spiders he’s even seen were both in my house. That’s probably because I won’t kill them so they get to grow fat on the hated flies. It really has nothing to do with the stories or all the demonic books, but it’s fun to let people think so.

It was my first trip to our new Aldi, which really is right next door to Tesco. Aldi is very like Lidl in layout – so very like Lidl that it was no trouble at all to find things. The whisky is in the same place too, although Aldi have different whiskies.

Glen Orrin is a five year old vatted malt – a blend of malt whiskies. There are also two single malts on the shelves but I thought it best to start at the low end and work up. Glen Orrin is actually quite pleasant, maybe a little nicer than Lidl’s Glen Orchy, maybe exactly the same in a different bottle. No, not exactly the same, it’s a lighter shade than Glen Orchy. If we hadn’t polished off the BrewDog beers first it might have been easier to judge the taste.

We should not have finished the Glen Orrin. Really we should not have started it. We should have stopped with BrewDog.

When you recall my history as the man who was once trapped in a hole under an enormous rhubarb root, the man who tried to paint the stairwell and ended up painting the only bit of carpet that did not have sheeting over it, the man who opened the door to the grill only to have the glass front of the oven door drop into it and shatter… Really, considering my history, drinking in a kitchen with a newly-tiled smooth and shiny floor was never the best of ideas. Especially as drink tends to make me overestimate my stability.

That’s why the whisky goes so well with the writing, because I’m sitting down. The worst that can happen is that I fall asleep in my chair and wake up with yet another case of Quasimodo Neck. I did once fall off my chair (asleep) due to drink and fatigue but it’s not far from the chair to the ground, there is carpet on the floor and no sharp edges in between.

The kitchen is a different prospect. When I slipped, I think I hit every door handle and work surface on the way down to the concrete-with-a-thin-layer-of-vinyl floor. Various cuts and bruises resulted, naturally, and I smacked my lower left ribcage against the corner of the sticking-out bit of the kitchen surface.

That brought an end to the evening. Visitor left after checking I wasn’t dead this time and that I would be likely to survive a little while yet. I made it to bed.

In the morning, any attempt by a hangover to make me suffer was hopelessly overshadowed. So were all the cuts and bruises, most of which I did not notice at all until the pain in my ribs subsided (around 6 pm) enough to allow me to get up. I had whacked my ribcage in exactly the same place where I cracked a rib almost two years ago – and it really felt like I had re-cracked it. I don’t think I have this time, it still aches and is tender to touch but doesn’t have that sharp stabbing pain from last time.

The pain, though, was intense. There was no lying position that alleviated it for long and changing positions was like rolling over on a bed of nails. I wondered if I had ruptured my spleen at one stage. The fact that it is getting better is encouraging but even so, I might have to bite the bullet and visit a doctor if the pain is still there tomorrow. Those edges are hard and could cause some internal damage.

Tonight is a night of no alcohol at all. It’s something I do from time to time to prove to myself that I have not become alcoholic. Since I never hit the bottle until the late evening, I’m confident that I have so far escaped dependency and the occasional ‘day off’ proves it. An alcoholic simply couldn’t do it.

Besides, if I need to visit the doctor’s tomorrow, it’s best not to arrive with whisky breath. That leads to the immediate assumption that the visit was brought about by booze. A correct assumption in this case, but an assumption nonetheless. Doctors should not be making snap judgements. Too many of them do just that, which makes them hard to trust.

So the new kitchen has drawn first blood. It was probably egged on by all the other rooms. They’ve all seen my blood at one time or another.

Soon the new computer arrives. I wonder what that will do to me?