DJ-Ortho's gonna rock da house

Surprise, surprise, the hospital still didn't have any heel wedges in stock so I smugly produced my own set and was told "at least you've got some initiative". Most upsetting was the boot: certainly not the Beckham Boot- the picture in the last post showed him in an Aircast which at least looks as designed as a snowboard boot and is supposed to be quite light. Mine was made by "dj-ortho", a moniker I fully intend to adopt for the next podcast. Imagine a heavy canteen tray with a pair of flattened bicycle forks sticking upwards from it. Then get a one size fits all foam sock thing and 5 Velcro straps that tighten over the foot and calf, tightening around the bicycle forks to hold it in place. Imagine that the Velcro straps are preferentially drawn to sticking to each other in a monstrous tangle when putting it on, rather than to the appropriate parts. Imagine also that gravity on the wearers leg is increased by a factor of four. This explains why you don't see dj-ortho wearers hanging about on quaysides or river banks- they know if they fall in it is a certain "cement boot death" and the inquest will conclude that the mob did them in. (oh my God as I write this I can hear my wife in the other room on the phone laughing to her friend about my club-foot..) Now we mustn't forget the wedges, these add the extra exhilaration of wearing one high heel in your heavyweight school dinner tray.

With hindsight I can laugh at my naivety thinking I would get a magic boot and I could start really working my tendon. It seemed when they took the plaster off that my foot had been replaced by a corpsefoot or a dead fish. It was all pale and puffy and lots of plates of smelly yellowing skin on the sole. You could easily deduct from looking at the waxy effigy that time of death was exactly 4 weeks ago. It was the opposite of a phantom limb. This thing had nothing to do with me and had obviously been forgotten by my brain during its incarceration. So standing up in dj-ortho was a kind of sick sensation- "no way can I put my weight on my heel!" as if it was all going to give way. Then after wearing my boot for a while, my corpsefoot had transformed into "old lady's ankle"- that jacket potato oedematous look that smooths over the shape of your anklebones. Even my 80 year old mother still has lovely slim ankles.

Luckily this effect settled overnight with my foot ramped up on its 4 pillow stack.
I have now got used to waddling along with this contraption although there are some drawbacks. The huge footprint significantly increases the chance of standing in dogshit. In fact I have just come in the door and brought in a dollop of foxshit which is far more shitty. The leg lengthening means my back goes through all sorts of strains and I end up externally rotating my hip to avoid the feeling I am going to snap my knee backwards. This ends up resembling a hesitant jazz dancer who is about to go into an ambitious spin but just can't quite commit. Over and over again with each step. In fact every time I go out there is a circle of hip clubbers stood in a circle around me clapping to a Ronnie Laws tune, whilst I get the beer towel hanging from my back pocket to wipe my brow..

So I'm off to the hospital again to fracture clinic this afternoon. To recap, I had my achilles tendon repaired 4 weeks ago and the surgeon had convinced me of all the benefits of early mobilisation in an airboot. (In fact he called it a Beckham boot, as do lots of others- perhaps it's one of those matey colloquialisms, or perhaps it's an expensively made football boot with lots of rubbery bits so I can do a curling shot over the defence's wall). Anyway, when the op was over they realised they didn't have the heel wedges to put my foot in the equinus (high heeled) position, so they told me they would have put a plaster cast on and order the wedges for 2 weeks time in fracture clinic. So there i was 2 weeks ago in fracture clinic, enjoying the feeling of cool air on my foot as it was cut from its encasement only to be told: "sorry have the boots but we are still out of heel wedges" we'll put you in plaster for 2 more weeks". Being a quack myself, I had been quite passive so far, not wanting to be a difficult patient for my fellow doctors. But 4 weeks delay whilst my calf shrivelled away? All those explanations of early weighbearing being ideal to induce collagen formation in the healing tendon now dissipated away. Not only do all my possessions nearlywork, not only do I nearly work, but also my local hospital doesn't quite work. So the following week after that, the orthotics department told me that they was a delay on the next batch being made and the factory had just relocated to Glasgow, blah blah, all true of course (and actually worse because when I phoned the factory they told me the delay might be many more weeks) but of course there are lots of suppliers out there with the blessed part in stock. So now I am £10 poorer but armed with that vital piece of equipment, a low tech stack of polystyrene wedges held together by double-sided tape with a bit of neoprene on top that arrived at my door 10 hours after ordering it.

Anyway, I'll get a good chance to read a book this afternoon as fracture clinics usually run very late. Last time I got through a good chunk of Oliver Sack's Musicophilia. I got 3 hours of reading in before being seen. The fire alarm went off also so I hobbled outside into the car park with all the other staff and patients until some very overweight firemen arrived to reset it. Today I'm going to take Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works. Or perhaps I wont take anything and I'll sit continually tutting in the waiting room. I hope they don't call it a Beckham Boot again. I might turn into a toxic pedant and ask them where David Beckham's endorsement is on the product. Or ask them if I can play football in it.

Sympathetic Strings

Before uploading the last podcast I had to downsize it under the 30mb size to be allowed to be uploaded on my free account. I did the conversion in itunes which recognised it as : "Sympathetic Strings with Pipe Speaker". The artist is possibly South East Asian because the details come up in those blank rectangles you get when your computer doesn't have the particular font. I didn't know what sympathetic strings were but when I did a search I found this video of Mark Deutsch playing the "Bazantar", an instrument with sympathetic strings which he built himself. Dark sound eh?

The Nearlypod is almost launched

Hello to all you out there whether you and your possessions completely or nearly work. I have always been perplexed by the relation of man and technology and how the two interact. This relationship has always been pushed to the forefront of my mind by the constant job of repairing, servicing or just managing things. These struggles compete with my full time job in terms of time and energy. All I can say is I'm glad I have left cars alone. These really are a nearlyworks black hole. Of course one has to fully dismantle a car engine and rebuild it at least once, just to quench that particular thirst and to reassure oneself that those schematics in the "how things work" books were actually correct. Having abandoned cars, I have realised that the structure of my home has needed undoing and redoing, partly through curiosity and partly through need. One day I realised that most people don't actually go through this struggle. When things don't work they get someone in, get a new one, phone up and complain etc. When things of mine go wrong, I get a secret internal surge of joy; something has failed but now I can smell the project looming. There is a good reason to get the casing undone! There are part numbers to look up, internet searches, more fun is buying used parts on ebay (what bigger thrill than to buy a part knowing that there is a risk that it too might only nearly work?) This is the like the stage when you point the video camera at the TV that is monitoring it. You may be falling down the speeding tunnel to the very answer of dark matter and stuff itself. Or you have slipped through a time-door into the video for Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

Don't worry, I fully intend to bore you all in great detail about my various bodged projects but recently something happened to me, so as I sit here typing this I look over the top of the laptop to view the cast on my right leg. Having recently ruptured my achilles tendon, a surgeon has fashioned it back together and it sits healing in its warm dark encasement, awaiting rehabilitation. So now I nearly work. The one benefit of nearly working is that whole sections of your life get cordoned off. Going to work. Gardening. Driving. Cycling. Running. Skateboarding. Snowboarding. Rebuilding shelves. Carrying a cup of tea from one room to the next. So there is an imposed restraint which I must say I am quite enjoying because my scatterbrain concentration is gathered in a little. So now I can read, read the whole of the newspaper and read books. Ah yes, books those wonderful things that the average nearlyworker neglects, such is the velocity of thoughts passing through his/her mind. A book would simply cause the thoughts, projects and ideas to bottleneck, causing immense strain. Not now though...

Oh yes, podcasts. I did my first podcast yesterday and in the "all about me theme", it consists entirely of music and other noises that I have made, or at least been part of making with others.

Inspired by the rockmother and her wonderful set of podcasts, I thought: if she can do it so can I, so here it is, or at least it will be later tonight when I have worked out how to upload the thing..

Get Nearlypod One now!