I'm out of action at the moment. This is what my left foot looked like on Sunday night:
A surgeon hacked away at it on Monday, and now it looks like this:
Apparently underneath all the bandaging and stitches, my foot is straighter. In a couple of months, according to my friend, Deborah Keyser, I will be a foot model.
In the meatime, I have to lie still for a few days and creak around on crutches. I'm not allowed to take a shower or bath for two weeks (!), but I am forced to take a lot of pain killers, and - an added bonus - to watch multiple episodes of Say Yes to the Dress: Bridesmaids on TLC without feeling as though I am committing a crime against my brain cells.
However, after some channel roaming today, watching people on TV buy a house, try on dresses, consider moving abroad, wrestle with their inferior parenting skills, resist and then succumb to a makeover, and/or cook something that allegedly only takes 15 minutes to make, I'm not exactly Proust lying in a cork-lined room. TMiddy rebelled at one point. "You and I are perfectly suited in every way," he said, "except when it comes to television."
But this isn't normal television: it's sickbed television. In the past, this meant Terms of Endearment or Adventures in Babysitting. (Later it was Under the Tuscan Sun or The Devil Wore Prada.) But it's hard to find movies like these for free on British TV.
I recorded Letters to Juliet last week to save for yesterday, when I knew I'd be lying around in a codeine-enhanced haze, but I only managed fifteen minutes of that before hitting delete on the remote. It was too crummy even for sickbed television! Either silly, soppy movies that insult women's intelligence are getting worse or I'm getting more discerning - and I think we all know that the latter isn't true. I don't even think I could have watched it on a plane, and that's saying something: I watched Sex and the City I on a plane, and (even worse) Eat Pray Love. Once I watched Apocalypto on someone else's screen two rows up, i.e. without sound, and felt as though I wasn't missing anything.
We have a ton of DVDs here at home to watch, but my attention span isn't up to a Fassbinder or Roberto Rossellini festival quite yet. It's not even up to the last four episodes of Arne Dahl. I watched some of The White Queen this afternoon, looking up the biographies of characters on my phone at the same time to pretend the whole exercise was educational.
Maybe tomorrow I'll feel like reading again, and getting on with some work. I have a poem up online today - something I never thought I'd say. But this week I also agreed to have my left foot broken, pins inserted, a bone shaved off, etc, so who knows what I'll do next?
Of all the movies available in the vicinity, why not My Left Foot? Oh, I forgot, you want something to take your mind OFF the foot.
Posted by: Barry Ahearn | August 08, 2013 at 10:49 PM