The Incident

Summer is a beautiful season, full of hope and potential (perhaps a leftover from the lengthy summer holidays of back in t'day). I'm going to visit my old haunts in Cornwall, and the friends that still - in my mind at least - spend their days joyfully beaching around and their evenings sipping scrumpy on the harbour. I'm going to drink wine with my lover in the under-ground bar we had our third date at. I'm going to go to my first festival with my new LondonFriends... and so on. You get the picture. Summer: woohoo, yay, bring it on! Apart from, in reality, these plans never quite materialised.

So, here I was, August bank holiday. Nearing the end of a summer that - while yielding many delightful experiences and exquisite people - never did quite deliver in terms of those plans. After a particularly financially demanding few months we sold our festival tickets, thus kissing goodbye to hazy summer music-framed-fuckery. Never mind, all will work out in the end. Here comes the carnival, who needs a festival when you have such an amazing street party on your doorstep (LondonDoorstep, that is. one tube away? doorstep). I didn't know what exactly to expect but I was sold at Tom's mention of jerk chicken and drum n bass. Before I knew it we were on a sweaty tube, laiden with Strongbow and Red Stripe and my face may or may not have had blue metallic stuff on it. Leaving the tube and venturing into the party we cracked our beers open and headed for the sound systems.

Pretty early on I realised that Tom - my lovely boyfriend - hadn't really got the feel of the carnival across to me before. He'd sold the party but that's just standard. It was sensory overload - my actual favourite thing in the universe. I was running around like a kid in a sweetshop. Let's dance! My nose is wibbling... run through the crowd. Follow the parade, blow my whistle, dance dance dance. GIVE ME THE CHICKENS! dance dance dance. cocktail. Look at those costumes! daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaance. wibble wibble. I am making my first real piece of art since moving to London about this experience. It's just what I'm doing. This experience probably IS my first piece of art since moving to London. The only problem was the weeing. At first there was not much queuing for the toilets but by the evening when we'd got a few cans inside us there was much more need for the weeing and far fewer facilities for it. Never mind, that's what people's garden shrubbery is for.

A beautiful day, a party party. What better way to end it than with my pants around my ankles and a breeze against my thighs? After a spot of the old weeing-willy japes (yes, we're very close) it was time to exit our beautiful flowery potty. ONWARDS! OUR PARTY AWAi-- shit. Who left a rock there? And I didn't know feet are supposed to bend like that.

Well, it turns out that they're not. After a long journey home involving a rickshaw and crawling on my knees, 2 days spent crying in pain, falling over, and... more crawling... I ended up in a&e in a wheelchair getting prodded and X-rayed and put in plaster. As they awarded me with drugs and crutches, and gave me strict instructions about elevation and rest and fracture clinic all I could think about was 5-6 weeks off work. 5-6 weeks on statutory sick pay that doesn't cover my rent. While slightly going into shock about this I forgot that I live in an upstairs flat that is the opposite of crutch-friendly. The reality of that only hit home when I found myself crawling up the stairs in agony with my aunt (who had kindly driven me to the hospital to spare me the joys of £20 in taxi fares) worrying over me and holding my crutches and pointless shoe.

Utterly pointless shoe, now focus of all my anguish.