So then, a whole day after my last blog entry on Livejournal I had a bit of an incident. I was trying to walk quickly towards the tube station to get to work, rushed across the road and my right shoe thudded against an uneven patch by the bus lay-by, and I promptly landed on the ground chin-first. I lay there dazed for a few seconds, groaned, stood up and watched unnerved as a rush of blood poured out of my face and collected into a puddle on the concrete below.
The first person on the scene was a rather sour-faced woman with a heavy foreign accent who tried to advise me about how I could sue the Council for what had just happened, before actually telling me what it was that I'd done or how bad the damage was. "Here is my calling card, you can call me, I can be witness!" she said enthusiastically.
"What have I DONE?" I asked her, still shocked.
"I think maybe you break a tooth", she replied before walking off.
But I hadn't. Another more helpful lady pointed out that I had a flap of skin hanging loose from my chin and that it "Wasn't too bad, but you'd better get to A&E".
Of course, it was quite bad. I waited for hours to be seen in A&E and ended up getting six stitches, though by the time they got around to sewing me up I was just relieved to get the business done so I could get out of there, to be honest. The A&E waiting room had three children in it running around and playing loudly with their football and noisy emergency vehicle toys which made realistic siren noises - I'm seldom in the mood for enjoying the effervescent rough and tumble of other's sprogs at the best of times, never mind when I've got an appalling headache and blood running out of a split in my face. Here's what I was left with a couple of weeks back once the stitches were in place:
But it's beginning to heal up a lot better now, and thankfully I can also just about shave again, so the beardage has disappeared.
I've been in touch with my local council to talk about getting the faulty patch of road repaired, which seems to have thrown them into an almighty confusion. First they couldn't find the damage, then they realised they couldn't find the damage purely because they were looking at the pavement, not the road, even though I filled out a form suggesting that the problem was in the highway. You know, if I did decide to sue and face these people in court, I think I'd probably win within seconds of them opening their mouths. It's lucky for them that I really despise blame culture.