The Refuge

Well now, it has been one of those weeks and why, pray tell, why wouldn’t it be, when it is almost certainly shaping up to be one of those lives?

Do settle an argument for me: if a person walks past and blatantly ignores an item another person has left on the stairs (clearly intended to be carried up by next stair dweller), on the way up the stairs, and then runs down the stairs and trips over said same item and ends up in hospital having done something drastic to his shoulder, then it the persons OWN fault, mais non? Mais oui. Or in another words, of course it bloody is!

Dear readers I am relying on you to agree with me, for that very thing happened to in-house six foot four man last night and after much drama and fainting and vomiting, and visits from our lovely neighbours much alarmed by noise of giant man slipping down the stairs on shiny, skiddy lap top bag I left there (ahem), I took in the green pallor of his skin and carted him off to hospital post-haste, me cracking jokes all the way and him groaning and whimpering and in the kind of dreadful pain the triage nurse took terribly seriously and dosed him up and trollied him off to x-ray straight away without the usual three to four hour wait usually demanded by British accident and emergency units.

I swear this kind of drama doesn’t happen to other people on a regular basis. And so now here I am again. Wearing my nurses hat and click clucking around a man in a sling and a boy who wants me to fashion him a matching one from a scarf. Making tea on demand seeking refuge in my old stand-by: housework, while having hissy fits when my patient won’t sit still and is instead to be found crawling around the laundry room floor trying to help by mopping the floor with a cloth.

Oh yes.  When calamity strikes, I clean. I can barely help myself today. After spending most of the week at my Mums house celebrating my dads’ birthday and being utterly charmed by our darling babba Clarry, and then last night in Casualty, I have woken up this morning shocked to see how quickly these Halloween-esque cobwebs have formed in our absence. So I am a woman on a mission. A woman certain, as I have long believed, that homemaking shore’s us against ruin, and that this is no more true than when unexpected disaster threatens to hasten that ruin…

Let’s not psycho-analyze this too deeply. Nor consider what kind of crazy lady truly believes it is possible to right the wrongs of her upside down world, when armed only with a pump-action bottle filled with tea-tree oil and vodka and instead consider what a blessing it is, to have the refuge that is a thorough scrub, instead of feeling the urge to tip said vodka down one’s neck when life spins, yet again, completely out of control. All then is not quite as it should be, but there will always, always be sheets to launder and a grate to polish won’t there?

And no matter what he says: it was his OWN fault. One must always have the last word, don’t you know?