The Joys Of Enforced Immobility

I have been more or less house-bound for the last two months while recuperating from an operation to repair a torn Achilles tendon. The operation itself only takes about 45 minutes, but the recuperation is long and tedious – filled with sharp warnings from the doctor about slipping and winding up back on his table. “It’s not that I don’t want to see you again, but . . .” Time outside has been necessarily limited because of the difficulty of manoeuvring first with a plaster cast and then with a cumbersome ‘walking’ boot and crutches. Just as well, because one doesn’t want to incur the wrath of one’s surgeon by tripping on London’s uneven sidewalks and tearing the tendon again. The thought of an acid “I told you so” was enough to keep me indoors.

            Your wife meanwhile picks up the slack by doing all the normal chores of shopping, cooking, washing, house cleaning, etc. plus sorting out all the bits of equipment that seem to accompany this recuperation and doing all the fetching and carrying I used to do. All you can do is smile sheepishly and make sure you've booked two tickets to the finest hotels in Paris once the whole process is over.

This would do very nicely, thank you

The period started with the best of wholesome intentions. The ‘Great Novel’ was going to get finished. That lasted about a day-and-a-half. Putting aside notes for the novel, the next great idea was to improve my French. First, listen to various French programs on-line. Next, hire a French teacher to come once a week. Alas, this is continuing, but the mysteries of French irregular verbs still confound me. As for the accent? Well, very polite Frenchmen nod their heads as if following every word before turning to a friend asking if they understood just what I was trying to say.

OK, so out come the Great Books on topics I should have read in university many years ago. Time to catch up. Then there are on online lectures. I eagerly sign up for one or two of those only to find that the professor giving these particular lectures was a high-school classmate of my daughter. How to feel simultaneously old and dumb. That’s OK. On to the books. Mary Beard’s entertaining history of ancient Rome, SPQR, a new book on Byzantium and Philip Mansel’s book on the sad fate of Aleppo. Then a real door stop called Moscow 1937. Actually, much more interesting than the name implies. All well and good, but after a couple of hours of Cicero’s problems, the innumerable plots and counter-plots of Byzantium, or Stalin’s endless purges my mind starts to turn to tapioca.

 

With the best of intentions . . .

Time for a little light entertainment. So, we crank up the Kindle and order a long list of international murder and mayhem books that pass for entertainment. That’s fine, but after a while the plots sort of meld into each other and it’s easy to lose track of just who is good or bad, or who is being targeted by yet another dysfunctional super assassin. They’re also a bit like Chinese food. You finish them quickly and are still hungry.

My next cunning plan to pass the time was to tackle that long list of ‘useful’ DIY tasks that every home has. What better time than during my enforced immobility?To be polite, my DIY skills were somewhat lacking when I had two good legs, and probably hadn’t improved with the cast and crutches. Nonetheless, we soldier on.  Fortunately, after a few abject failures, a very clever and skilled Slovenian plumber/electrician was able to repair the damage.

 

Weapons of mass destruction

Oh well, there’s always daytime television. Settling back in a comfortable chair armed with the remote control and a cup of tea I start to graze through the daytime TV offerings. Not an enlightening exercise. I used to think that nothing in this world could equal the utter wasteland of American daytime TV. I was hoping that in the UK, where they are always trying to set cultural examples for the colonials, things might be a little better. Wrong, very wrong. Nothing but mindless game shows, equally mindless talk shows and idiotic, so-called ‘celebrity’ shows, programs about people looking for real estate in unlikely locations, and re-runs of programs that should have been declared dead a very long time ago. 

The Sahara desert has more life

Do British TV stations have nothing better on offer than yet another re-run of WW II with the likes of Dam Busters, Battle of Britain, and other epics revealing British valour and genius against the evil Nazis? The war ended more than 70 years ago. Surely there is something more timely on offer. Forget the war, how about endless re-runs of ancient detective shows like Columbo, Miss Marple or the same cowboy shows over and over again. John Wayne is OK. But morning, noon, and night?  Time to move on. Then there’s the always reliable BBC 4 that mercifully stays off the air until early evening. Then you’re bound to be riveted by worthy shows detailing things like the sex life of the anchovy. This is enough to drive anyone back to Stalin’s Moscow. By the way, it’s not just British TV that is fixated with World War II. Shelves in book shops groan with books on the Hitler period, but you will look in vain for anything about post-war Germany, the transformation from pariah to powerhouse.

The ultimate remedy 

After all this, plus the exercises one is supposed to do plus the slimmed down menu your wife has diligently prepared you’re completely knackered by the end of the day. Then you drift off to sleep with sweet dreams of Jimmy Buffet’s Cheeseburger in Paradise.