Strange day (second in a never-ending series)

In truth, this strangest of strange days happened one and a half weeks ago, but I still haven’t quite recovered from the fact that, for a few short minutes, I was stand­ing in my under­pants (not just my under­pants, but my trousers were cer­tainly round my ankles at the time) in front of the age­ing, double amputee father of a lead­ing Tory politi­cian. To be fair to him, he was actu­ally very friendly — the father, I mean, not his lead­ing Tory politi­cian off­spring, who sadly wasn’t present to wit­ness such a cli­mactic moment in the erosion of my dig­nity — and had obvi­ously seen this all before. Oh yes. Fel­low stand­ing between par­al­lel bars, trousers pooled at his feet, being fit­ted with an almost grot­esquely basic and homemade pros­thetic limb. Been there, done that, brought the false leg along with me, old chap.

Just this one audi­ence mem­ber would have made me feel quite embar­rassed enough, thank you very much, but there were in fact two of them. Lead­ing Tory politician’s dear papa was chat­ting away ami­ably with another eld­erly gent of equally refined breed­ing, as they watched this inno­cent, wide-eyed young­ster — well, I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I’m in my mid-thirties — being fit­ted with his first pros­thesis. Maybe I was ima­gin­ing it, but I couldn’t help but detect a pos­sible hint of fath­erly pride in their bene­vol­ent gaze as they viewed yet another new mem­ber receiv­ing the bizarre ini­ti­ation into this rather exclus­ive club. Per­haps it was just their appear­ance, but for some reason they reminded me of an upper-crust but rather more polite ver­sion of Statler and Wal­dorf from The Mup­pet Show.

Des­pite the some­what unusual situ­ation, for the first time since this — for want of a bet­ter term — Miss­ing Leg Busi­ness star­ted, I no longer felt like I was a patient or some extraordin­ary med­ical case. Every­one was very friendly, down-to-earth and res­ol­utely non-medical. After all, they’ve seen miss­ing limbs come and miss­ing limbs go, albeit gen­er­ally depart­ing with vari­ous devices strapped onto them. Indeed, the whole exper­i­ence felt more like being given an MOT in a delight­fully gen­teel vehicle work­shop rather than treat­ment in a hospital.

Den­nis — the afore­men­tioned bearded, camp, middle-aged pros­thet­ist intro­duced in a pre­vi­ous entry — advised me at one point that the newly-fitted first ver­sion of my pros­thetic limb would have to be adjus­ted. I imme­di­ately began envisaging some com­plex med­ical pro­ced­ure car­ried out in a clin­ic­ally sterile envir­on­ment, but he inter­rup­ted and shattered my illu­sions as he cheer­ily informed me that he was “just going to pop next door and get a span­ner, and then I’ll see if I can adjust this bolt”. Bolt? Span­ner? This soun­ded lethal. I con­sidered run­ning, run­ning like the wind out of these crazy sur­round­ings filled with serenely smil­ing people, before quickly remem­ber­ing that I was still at the stage where I would fall flat on my face if I so much as attemp­ted stag­ger­ing two steps for­ward. Oh well.

And so it was that Statler and Wal­dorf had a superb ring­side view as — trousers now pulled back up round my waist, I’m pleased to say — Den­nis mer­rily attacked my false leg with the assor­ted con­tents of his tool­box. Hav­ing made the neces­sary adjust­ments to my equip­ment (ahem), he turned his atten­tion to the lead­ing Tory politician’s father: “I’m ready for your legs now, Mr ——-. I’ll just see if I can get the annoy­ing creak­ing in your feet sor­ted out”. Within a few minutes, I had become an old hand at all this. I knew the score. I barely bat­ted an eye­lid as Den­nis picked up a pair of lower legs from the floor and car­ried them out of the room. I real­ised that the ‘com­plex pro­ced­ure’ he was about to carry out would prob­ably involve little more than a few quick squirts of WD40 on the affected mov­ing parts, fol­lowed by a few gentle taps with a ham­mer. Maybe he would check the oil gauge and the tyre pres­sures while he was at it, too.

Oh, I sup­pose you want to know about the leg, don’t you? You’ve seen the Para­lympic ath­letes on TV, and you’re already ima­gin­ing some sleek, light­weight, shiny black metal append­age that allows me to leap and bound like a ver­it­able gazelle. Well, I hate to dis­ap­point you but … no, not quite. Of course, this was only Pros­thetic Limb mk1, but even I was some­what alarmed as Den­nis proudly presen­ted me with a rubber-tipped metal pole attached to a rigid, see-through plastic socket. There was no foot to be seen. Not even a mov­able knee. It was the ori­ginal peg leg. How­ever, since to these eyes it looked more post-apocalyptic cyborg than Long John Sil­ver, within minutes I had christened it my Mad Max chic apparel. I’m still hop­ing that even after I have my proper limb, they will let me keep this one to wear to fancy dress parties.

It’s lethal. I could take somebody’s eye out with this thing. Or worse. Indeed, my main worry has been that I might inad­vert­ently goose someone with it as I wheel down the cor­ridor to the canteen, proudly thrust­ing a large metal cattle prod in front of me.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean for us to become intim­ately acquain­ted quite so quickly. Don’t blame me. Blame the leg. I call him Max. Mad Max. Have you been intro­duced? Oh yes, you have. Oops.”