Even clean hands cause damage
Los guantes. I'm pointing at them. Blue, latex, M-for-medium, stuttering 'g' 'g' 'g' imploring my brain for more, but again get only as far as 'g...'. The Spanish dishy puts me out of my misery and says 'los guantes'. Gloves, of course.
The exercise is part of my desperation to make more of a summer spent waiting tables. When I screw up my knee, I work harder still to compensate for my poor standing, interrogating the Bulgarian chef for a detailed history of a country I can't even place on a map. I will get something out of this. Anything!
Despite my collapsed knee-cap, the NHS-appointed physio is terribly polite about the state of my body. I wonder why until my hydro-therapy sessions where in my swimmers under fluoro lights I realise compared to the general hospital populace I'm in good shape. Getting around on crutches I'm suddenly struck by the sheer number of people similarly (and now I want to say crippled, but I think it might be wrong, yet it seems so right, it seems that's exactly what they are) crippled (by life, by London, by lower/fewer everything). I try to figure out why there are so many lame people in London, whether we've let our bodies go to waste, or the city's such a bitch it's broken us.
On the bright side, the chat is amazing. Guys trip over each other to give me their seat. I'm touched and more than a bit surprised. I persist with the cafe on reduced activity, a-grade painkillers and the novelty of saying no, we're out of sparkling mineral water and watching the unruffled unravel. I get my mate Jake a job. He's an out-of-work geophysicist, and it makes me feel like less of a loser to undertake menial tasks alongside a big brain like his.
I open up at 7 one morning, unaware the pest controller had been in the previous night. I barrel in proving to no-one I'm a morning person, and pull up stuck, shaking a sticky tile from my sneaker. The situation sinks in and as I kick my leg like mad to detach the damn thing I see mice––tiny, shivering lumpettes––dotting the floor. I scream and back-track outside into the path of the Bulgarian, who thinking I'm the inquisitive type describes how they die. We wait for the heavy-footed pest inspector to return and put us all out of our misery.
By the end of summer I was spent. I decide to take a 'time out' from study and subsequently lose what meagre 'work rights' I had. With the colder weather the buses have started smelling of hot babies and warm chips and I'm wondering what the hell I'm doing. Thank god for friends, because at nine pounds a margarita, tequila remains a temporary solution at best. In an attempt to rediscover the love, I went to the Tate yesterday, but it just made me sad. The usual: 'please don't touch the artwork' had been updated with an addendum 'even clean hands cause damage' and I couldn't (and can't) get the sentiment out of my mind.
Berlusconi's mani pulite trial comes to mind.