Thursday, January 13, 2005

Like an ever-spinning wheel

Cards seem to have been the turning point today. Emma J in Folkestone has her birthday this Saturday and, most uncharacteristically, I managed to remember, purchase, write and post her a birthday card this morning. I’d actually planned to go down to see her this weekend but she has her mother visiting so she wouldn’t be up for much socialising.

At work today I got called on to exercise my First Aid skills for the first time. One of my colleagues had been at a yoga class, overbalanced and dislocated his thumb. The Receptionist in the office, who was treating him, couldn’t remember how to create a sling out of a triangular bandage. It turned out I couldn’t either. As we stood there fiddling with the bandage Tom, the injured party, joked how it was lucky the question wasn’t how to stop him bleeding to death. Actually if he’d been bleeding to death I’d have known what to do. Doing the actual life-saving bits is far easier than turning a triangular piece of cloth into a particular style of sling… Funny that - but part of the reason I took the qualification in the first place was seeing how easy it could be to save someone’s life.

The frailty of human life came up again this afternoon when I got a call from my father. My uncle Bill died today. He hadn’t been well for a while but he wasn’t that old either. The funeral is on Wednesday but I decided not to go to it. We were never close. In fact I don’t think I’d spoken to him in years. At the funeral I would just be in the way of the grieving process. So it turns out I wrote and sent two cards today.

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