Coccyx sucker

It’s raining.
The kale, broccoli, cauliflower and runner beans are loving it.
The raspberries are shrivelled and the strawberries have a little life left.
I am, officially, theeee most boring woman in the world.
I’ve been doing my yoga, and walking. I’ve been doing my hoeing and mowing. I’ve been mediating and chilling and then BOOM. Out of the blue I had a twinge.
Nothing major just a funny old twinge in the right lower back.
The twinge twanged more. The pain increased. So I went to my cranial osteopath.
I had sprained the sacroiliac.
When I was twelve, I was at a girls school in Bushey. Lots of money, and then me. My father kept wadges of dosh in his back pocket, flicking through the notes when he need to buy his pack of twenty ‘Senior Service’.
The school uniform was exclusive to Harrods. We had never been to Harrods. The sales assistants had never seen anything like the wide boy, market trader who swaggered through the underwear department. Bespoke suit courtesy of Moisha Spiel, his curly headed wife and me. He flashed the cash and bought me indoor shoes, outdoor shoes, a blue summer dress, a brown mac, brown beret and brown knickers, the paraphernalia that independent school girls required.
I arrived at the school, the new girl. Music bursary and East End manners. Miss Foulger, my piano teacher loved me. I loved her. She gave me her musical dictionary which still sits next to the top notes on my boudoir piano in the cottage. Miss Eddington and Miss Upcott loathed me. They thought I was coarse, crass and classless, which of course I was.
In the parquet floored hall we took lunch. Danced eurythmics and attended choir practice. Charlotte Rampling sung in the choir, punching the air with her fist in time to the music. A girl standing behind, me thought it a spiffing joke, to pull the chair away when we were asked to sit. I crashed to the ground.
Taken to the hospital, the doctor pulled on his Marigolds and proceeded too investigate my anal passage. ( I’ve often wondered, whether that rectal exploration was at all necessary.) Lying on my side I vowed I would never resort to latex gloves in later life.
The diagnosis was a bruised sacroiliac. That practical joker from the lower fifth, probably living in a timber framed house somewhere in Hertfordshire with children of her own, will be ignorant of the grief she caused me. The trauma of that fall has stayed with me since 1962.
So the simple task of hoeing my roses and plucking out the weeds, resulted in the 55 year trauma resurfacing, a literal pain in the butt.
For two weeks I have been ice-packing, pain killing, rearranging my sitting patterns and adopting a whole range of inappropriate postures. I’m walking around like a Chinese farmer with a stack of bamboo on her back. I sleep on the settee and bemoan the fact that, although I am flexible and able, my creaking frame is a reminder that things ain’t wot they used to be.
Yesterday I sat on two bean bags and watched Johanna Kontor serve her way to victory. It took me three ball changes to get myself off the floor. I am in constant eye contact with the cat, who shares the bean bags with me.
I’m now sitting in the kitchen, the garden resplendent with rain drops and I’m sporting two ice packs, a coating of pain killers, and two hot water bottles under my feet.
I am reliably informed that it could take six weeks to fully recover, in the mean time I shall think about fashioning a voodoo doll of the fifth former, and then stick pins in her coccyx. See how she likes it.