David Gillon

Or day and a bit.

I've really not been out of the house much this year, one bug after another and winter weather, etc, so yesterday afternoon I decided I really needed to pop out, at least to the supermarket. So I got myself ready, got the chair into the car, buckled up, turned the ignition, and the car went "wwwrrrrr".

Flat battery, enough power to work the dashboard, not enough to work the starter. I guess I really haven't been using it. It was getting dark at that point, so I left it for today.

Just to add to the fun, I woke up this morning with neckache. My neck is a lot better than it used to be*, but  I'm having a day where I can't decide whether I'm happier with a collar on, or off, which is a real pain in the neck. The pain levels aren't actually that high, but come with associated nausea and a slight light-headed feeling, which isn't my favourite thing.

I missed my chance to snag my neighbour and ask for a jump start, so I had to go for my battery charger, which has a solid record of charging my battery - it's never worked yet. I don't think it has the oomph to charge an actually discharged battery. So picture me fiddling about under the bonnet, while wearing a collar and unable to look down properly. Also picture me confirming 4 hours later the battery charger has kept up its record. I'll see if I can catch my neighbor tomorrow, if not I'll have to dig around and find the contact details for whoever my homestart is with this year.

And to add to the fun I remembered to go out and check whether there was any damage from this week's storms - something was making a disturbingly metallic screeching noise while the wind was blowing. So picture me trying to look at the roof of the house while wearing a hard collar - just as well I have a long garden. The roof of the house is, thankfully, fine. Then I looked down.

The roof of the shed, not so much. Fortunately it's just the tarpaper that's ripped and flapping loose, the wooden roof is intact, but it will still need replacing properly at some point. For now, picture me wearing a hard collar, tacking down a rip that's a foot above my head and as far away as I can reach.

I have a bottle of wine, and I think I'm fully entitled to use it.

* I wore a hard collar 23/7 for pretty much a decade. The root problem was probably a C5/6 disc prolapse, but it just wouldnt get better, As far as I can tell the problem was the way I limped putting lateral stresses on my neck, it finally went away spontaneously when I started using crutches and my limp smoothed out.