Back From The Brink
I'm not sure why the Grim Reaper did not call for me last night. Perhaps the credit crunch extends even to the Netherworld and the Big 'D' no longer does house calls. Perhaps soul-collecting has been outsourced to a private company and they went to the wrong street. Either way, I'm still here but if you'd seen the amount of blood in my bathroom last night you wouldn't have put money on that. It was like a scene from that CSI show. The place should have been cordoned off with yellow tape.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I need to explain why I've been absent from this blog for so long. It all started last Sunday when Mrs Zed set off for a few days in Glasgow while I took a couple of days off work so I could spend some quality time with our two children and a collection of takeaway menus from various Inverness eateries. Oh, don't worry, we did healthy stuff too. We went down to Whin Park, for instance, and hired rowboats. Then we went to the snack bar for ice cream. Stuff like that.
Somewhere, during those days, I picked up a bit of a bug and by the time Mrs Zed returned home my nose was running so fast you could have sponsored it for charity. Then came the chesty cough and the headaches and then the fever. On Wednesday I was due to be in Glasgow but instead I was in my bed making incoherent phone calls and cancelling appointments. It was the same on Thursday and Friday. I have a vague recollection of phoning Edi Stark to congratulate her on her . I also remember speaking to Roy Templeton in our Press Office about a Government suggestion that we have quotas for the amount of Scottish music on the radio. I thought I might have imagined that last call, but no, there it was in this morning's . It all seems so hazy but you have to remember I was coming in and out of consciousness and was using drugs with a street value of seventy-nine pence (supermarket own-brand).
Last night, however, Mrs Zed had had enough of this nonsense. She reasoned that if I was well enough to talk to folk from the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú then I was well enough to undertake a few light chores in the garden. Besides it was now Good Friday - a public holiday - and a traditional time for religious observance, chocolate gluttony and D.I.Y.
"The fresh air will do you good," she assured me, "now go and fix that fence."
An hour later and I was standing back to admire my handiwork while absent-mindedly loosening a rusty screw from a leftover plank of wood. That's when the screwdriver suddenly ran amok and inserted itself into the fleshy part of my palm just below my left thumb. It didn't stay there long. As I yanked it out it somehow managed to scrape across my bottom lip.
Naturally I remained calm. I walked - not ran - to the bathroom, washed my wounds and utilised so many bandages as to make an Egyptian mummy feel underdressed. Then, as one does these days, I went on the internet to investigate the so that I could lie awake until the early hours waiting for each one to manifest itself; lockjaw, blood poisoning, heart failure and death.
But, as I said, the Reaper did not come knocking. Maybe, like me, he's off the clock until Tuesday.
Maybe.
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