Manual Labour

Yesterday I helped Tamsyn's brother move house and boy are my arms tired! Whoever it was that told me six months of inactivity on a couch would turn me into a testosterone laden man-beast with muscles the size of overgrown watermelons and the stamina of a young werewolf was completely wrong, let me tell you.

You know you've experienced physical atrophy when an older gentleman with grey hair is bounding up 40 or so steps* ahead of you and politely not mentioning the fact that you're wheezing like a slightly punctured accordion. Still though, it was a nice day spent in the sun and I wasn't limping too badly after a few hours of walking about. Plus I got home that afternoon and my blood sugar was at normal levels for the first time in a while, which is a positive sign.

Apparently I have developed a reputation for British stiff upper-lippedness when it comes to my own pain. This began at the hospital when Tamsyn or her mum would accompany me and watch the nurse slicing off chunks of dead necrotic flesh from my toes. She would periodically pause to check if I was okay, and learned to watch my face because I would inevitably say 'fine, keep going' and then almost pass out. These days questions on the subject of my discomfort are treated with the same suspicious air that one might attach to a query like 'little Timmy, did you steal the last biscuit?' in that the asker would generally like to know the truth but is going to expect nothing but fabrication and deceit from the interrogated party.

I leave you with some pics of my toes, since frankly not everyone has such a blatant excuse to show their toes to the world and I should milk it for all it's worth.

More deformed Lefty. He enjoys romantic candle-lit dinners.

Righty has a dying nail and a love for fine wines.

*In Wellington almost everyone lives up or down a flight of stairs. Professional movers spend time in Nepal training with sherpas before they're allowed to shift heavy furniture.