It’s all good fun in the Harrison house at the moment. Val managed to trip over her handbag and break her ankle. At first she thought she’d sprained it but the next day it was swelling and really painful so a happy afternoon was spent in the local A&E.

Hospitals really treat you like a customer nowadays. You’re met at the door by a greeter, just like ASDA and given a ticket just like the cooked meat counter. Then a charming nurse comes over to see you and explains there’s a two and a half hour waiting list for the senior nurse or four hours for the doctor if you’d prefer to see your own GP.

Sadly our GP doesn’t have X-Ray equipment and isn’t geared to deal with broken bones so we figured he’d only send us back to the hospital. Neither do any of the local supermarkets…

So many hours later we returned home with Val’s leg in plaster. Since she couldn’t put it down on the ground for 48 hours, they offered crutches. Now we’d seen a number of teenage lads running around the place on crutches, I swear some of them were doing skateboard tricks with them. After 5 minutes, Val settled for a zimmer frame (walker to our transatlantic friends). Just like her Dad!

So, a difficult couple of days until it set, whereupon it was back to see the consultant in the fracture clinic. They removed the now set plaster and put another one onto her, with a fetching blue cover. This plaster only takes an hour to set, which is the good news.

The bad news is that the type of break she has means she should not put any weight on the leg for the next six weeks at least. But we’ve hung onto the zimmer frame.

As you can imagine, this has thrown a few spanners into the works. I thought I was busy before but now I know I am. Not just trying to keep the wheels of the web spinning and get the new book finished on the deadline; I’m now head cook, bottle washer, maid and shopper.

Trying to get across to the plot isn’t so easy with all this going on so I’m afraid things are going to pot on the plot. Now if you’ve been following my diary for years, you may have a feeling of deja-vu.  In October 2006 I said “To be accurate Val, with leg in plaster, directed me as to what was to go where”. You can find my old diary entries on the site here: Old Diary Entries

There are some differences though. For a start, it was the other ankle. She actually broke it in May 2006 but hobbled around for months thinking it was a bad strain and it wasn’t until weeks later that we visited the hospital who said it was broken but seemed to have healed anyway. Then we went back after more months and they plastered it up as it wasn’t healing after all. Not this time though, straight to A&E I said.

Well, must dash as I’ve got to cook now, washing day tomorrow. Last time I did this lot I turned Cara’s white school shirts pink. Still, it didn’t matter as the tumble dryer broke down and burnt everything anyway. There’s always a bright side.