Holy smoke, I sincerely hope the Pope is not accident-prone

I WAS so perturbed about the Pope’s broken wrist, I destroyed the bedroom and set fire to my underpants. You may think this an excessive response to His Holiness’s injury, but at least I wasn’t in the underwear when it ignited.

What got to me was the report that said he couldn’t pray, as a result of his fall. It appeared in one of yesterday’s papers, which the man in my life had thrown on the bed. Needing to figure out why a broken wrist would prevent the Pontiff communing with God, I leaned on one of the bookshelves beside the bed and it gave way. (Any comments on the amount of weight needed to bring down a well-built bookshelf will not be welcome.)

The shelf came down, bringing with it the three shelves below it, together with all of their contents, including books, papers, two open cans of coke, a notebook computer, a radio and a huge mug of coffee. It was a triage situation, where ruthless decision-making was called for. I knew I had to rescue the computer first, then the books, then the radio, from the cocktail of hot coffee and foaming coke without electrocuting myself on the multi-socket extension lead, which was awash. The rescue operation took me so long, I completely forgot about the underwear on the fireguard until alerted by a threatening smell.

The fireguard is part of a recent environmental and cost-saving move. I’ve given the clothes-drier its P45 and had a clothesline strung between two bits of the house. The alternative energy guy who’s selling me the wind turbine told me warmly that I have very productive wind, which is always comforting, and also good for clothes-drying, except where it gets so energetic it wraps the sheets around the line in a kind of extended swiss roll.

I was doing fine on Saturday until the visiting golden retriever decided to help. He took a bundle of folded underwear off the hedge and inserted it in a puddle of run-off from the rainwater barrel. This didn’t dirty the clothes, but wet them all over again, and since it was drizzling, I took them in and put them on the fireguard. The fire was lit because the shack in which we live has no insulation at all and is freezing, even in July. When I got back to them, one of them was smoking and the other two were getting there. All three pairs were pleasantly crisp as toast and roughly the same colour, having started out white. I’m still going to try wearing the two least damaged. (Separately.) There’s a recession on, you know. Plus the burnt smell has dissipated quite a bit, so I’ll emit no worse a pong than the average chain- smoker.

In one way, the episode was welcome. If experiencing constant accidents runs in your DNA, you begin to worry when there’s an interval that, because you’re overdue an accident, when the next one happens, it will be outsize in its destruction.

Anybody who has accidents frequently knows this, and I’m sorry for them. On the other hand, they should count themselves lucky not to have a surname that provokes inevitable cracks – when you’re on crutches, have a black eye or are missing a front tooth – of “Accident-Prone, are you? Ho. Ho. Ho.”

I’m convinced that there’s a quota of accidents that has to be fulfilled by a chosen few people. If you’re one of them and haven’t recently broken a bone, concussed yourself or accidentally removed a functional bit of your anatomy, life begins to feel strangely anti-climatic.

Accident-prone people develop an internal dialogue. As they fall over the flex they should have seen in their path, a little internal voice says “Don’t stiffen up, you know a rigid body hitting concrete is more likely to break than a loose and flexible...” The internal voice shuts up as soon as its owner connects with a hard object. That’s because the accident-prone person has to cope with that awful heartbeat-and-a-half between the collision and the moment when the pain comes home to roost. Every time it happens, they hope it won’t be as bad as the last time. And every time, it’s worse.

Just as the pain arrives, so do the passersby. You don’t get to select your passerby. Sometimes it’s a good class of passerby. Sometimes it’s a bad class.

The bad class of passerby is the one who offers you the one thing you not only don’t want, but that could kill you. Any card-carrying asthmatic will tell you that as their shoulders rise around their ears, their fingernails turn blue from oxygen-deprivation and they sound like a vacuum cleaner having a seizure, some helpful by-stander will offer them a glass of water. Just sucking in air is taking all their time and attention and they’d demonstrably choke on a glass of water, but the helpful third party dips into some muscle memory suggesting water-ingestion has some contribution to make to the crisis.

That kind of passerby is also the one who arrives up to a victim who is covered in blood with a broken bone poking through their skin, and asks the unanswerable question: “Are you all right?”

It’s at this point the internal voice of the accident victim comes back into action.

“I’m wonderful,” it says, through gritted mental teeth. “Grand. Amn’t I flying, sure can’t you see how great I am? If I could just get the blood that’s currently on the outside back inside where it should be, I could go and knock spots off those kids competing to present that TV3 programme.”

The accident-prone person doesn’t actually say any of this. They just murmur a suggestion that calling an ambulance might be an idea.

Then there’s a kind of passerby who likes to be active. They want the victim to sit up if they’re lying flat or lie flat if they’re sitting up. They want to cut boots off swelling ankles, roll up jackets as pillows and – even if nobody’s bleeding – tear a shirt in strips for a tourniquet.

These active helpers are always 10 years behind medical orthodoxy. So, when they come upon someone having an epileptic episode, they want to shove pencils between their teeth. NOT recommended. Or they want to put butter on a burn. NOT recommended.

I have a recurring nightmare where I’ve fallen off a horse (horses and me are strangers, but who can control what one does in dreams?). The fall has shattered my entire spine and left me speechless (no applause at the back, there). At this point in the nightmare, some helpful sod decides to load me into their car and take me to hospital, uncaring of the permanent damage they’re going to do to me. Last time this happened, I woke up, knocked over a container beside me and stepped, barefoot, onto the broken glass.

All of which leads me to sincerely hope His Holiness’s accident is an untypical once-off.

Running the Church at this time is challenge enough, without being accident-prone as well.