Blue, purple, green and yellow – just some of the colours my
knee has turned.
Every summer, I seem to
do violence to my knee, right at the start of the holidays.
I have knapped my kneecap on a boulder in Cappadocia and plonked my patella on a rock at Kaikoura.
Two years ago was the most spectacular: on our first day in
Cornwall I fell down down a step going into
a pub. (“Into”, I tell you.) I landed on
both knees on concrete and was writhing on the ground with agony.
The children tell me I wasn’t very polite to
people trying to help me up. A kind bystander disappeared and returned with
plasters from her house, but I had skinned my knees so thoroughly that there
was nothing left for the sticky bit of the plaster to adhere to.
This year we were in a wood in Languedoc. We had just climbed a hill by means of a
track slippery with smooth limestone.
The ascent was arduous in the heat and the descent treacherous. As it levelled out at the bottom, I relaxed, took
my eye off the ball and slipped over.
However, it could be worse – and at least now I have a
grazed knee, I know that it is truly the summer holiday.