Ms Mothermouse Regrets.

Mothermouse has broken a metatarsal, not from a night out with Joey Barton but from standing in the garden. This over exuberant standing thus required us to visit A&E equipped with Kindle, magazine, banana and plum. Though the wait for a pot was fairly short an extra sandwich became necessary. The pain from this fracture, I am assured, is nothing short of childbirth. We arrive home with Mothermouse on crutches. Now with one leg incapacitated, the other needed for support and both arms involved in crutch propulsion she is as incapacitated as a three-month-old baby and about as fractious. “Can you make me a coffee?” I oblige, but my first attempt is not sweet enough, my second is too cold, my third too hot. I realise I’m dealing with a new incarnate of Goldilocks. She tells me how difficult it is to have to ask for things. Well it’s not as bloody difficult as running up and down stairs seventeen times to get a cup of coffee just right. Two hours in and I need a lie down. I muse that I myself, in a similar condition, would be happily whistling Yankee Doodle Dandy whilst doing back flips. It’s then I realise I’m not good at caring. I must have been beaten as a child at the first signs of self-pity. If I had a toothache I had to put my foot in boiling water to take my mind off it. OK it was cheaper than buying Paracetamol but it’s made verbalising, “Oh poor you, it must be rotten” as problematic as tattooing a likeness of Mohammed on my forehead. I feel like Meatloaf, “I will do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” Mothermouse disagrees with these priorities. Through having to supply all Mothermouse’s necessities I begin to enter the female mind. The cats don’t have water, the birds need feeding, the curtains have a bit of lining showing, the tomato sauce needs clearing away, a shoe is in the wrong place and tomorrow’s tea needs getting out of the freezer. It’s all very frightening, a never ending knitting wool ball of considerations. I mean as a male I only have one, “What am I going to do next?” If I notice the cats are becoming wizen the next thing to do is supply water. It’s simple, linear and catches most things before they demise, and things that make no difference just don’t appear on the radar. Yes it’s likely someone like me caused the Black Death but my formidably powers of deduction might have also found the cure; it’s horses for roundabouts as they say.