skidding in broadside

Our hands contain bones almost perfectly like-for-like with the bones in the flat paddle of a dolphin’s fin, and with a horse’s front legs, and a bat’s wings.

No. This is not about evolution because we - humans - did not evolve from dolphins or horses or bats. If anything, we all evolve out of the same mushy green swamp after the stardust had crashed and created the planet. Or something like that.

My hands, the odd fingers bent this way and that by polyarthritis, ache and on - what I still call - bad days, my wrists are stiff and hot. I search for images of dolphin's fins and try to be amazed.
And reassured. Many years ago, holding myself carefully still at the side of a traditional rig sailing ship (whatever possessed me to go aboard?), seasick as never before, I watched my six year old and her father out there in the Indian Ocean swim with dolphins while the evening sun was setting at the horizon.

Anyway, I am getting used to it. Also, we changed the handlebars of my bicycle and invested in a gel-padded cycling gloves. This is exciting news to someone like me whose mode of getting from A to B has always been cycling. In fact, these gloves are almost one step too far as I am certainly not a fitness colourful lycra with snazzy helmet cyclist.

My grandmother cycled all her life, to the baker, the butcher, to church, she cycled to deliver her apples and home made jams to friends and family in town. After she had turned 80, rumour was that the police stopped the traffic on market day when she cycled to buy potatoes and onions and carrots. I am that kind of cyclist. I don't wear a helmet.

All I need now is to recover from a trifling chest infection that has sneaked up on me. Which has me flat out and wobbly. And of course I am already fretting about my job and what if this is getting worse (we are on day 3!). I have a sick cert until Easter Monday, after which, if I haven't improved, I'll go back to my lovely GP and we'll take from there. I have no idea why I am in such a heap about it.

In the words of the great Hunter S Thompson:

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow!What a Ride!"