In need of a cane?

I ended up hosting a Board meeting for my business at our house last week – the session necessarily being preceded by several days worth of frantic de-kinking. It was only when we sat down to start work that I realised that the ice bucket in the fireplace was filled with birches for the following weekend’s reformatory. Fortunately, my fellow directors must have assumed it was some modernist flower arrangement, so I managed to escape without questionning.

I did struggle to keep a straight face at a couple of points, though. See, I’d fallen heavily whilst running for a tram in the Netherlands a few days before, and was hobbling on a badly sprained, badly bruised ankle.

“You should use arnica for that,” our company chairman helpfully advised.

“Arnica?” I queried. “What’s that?”

And then our finance chap recommended that I should get myself a cane. I mean, what does one say? (“I’ve got about forty upstairs, but none of them’s meant for walking”?)

The vanilla-people-not-quite-getting-it continued in our local supermarket a couple of days later. We were purchasing rather a large quantity of root ginger, for non-cooking use during a weekend away. The young lass on the checkout placed the ginger on the scales, then stopped and looked at us: “What is this?” . Poor, sweet innocent: if only she knew…