Things you learn when you break your right wrist...

This, as most of you will notice, is not me. I've never been to a ski resort in my life...

However...

It’s amazing what you can do one-handed. But -

Loo rolls with faulty perforations are really irritating.

Loo roll dispensers on the right-hand side of the loo are really irritating.

People who don’t look where they are going and bash into your plastered-up and be-slinged arm are really irritating. Dogs and small children, ie mobile trip hazards, likewise, though they at least have the excuse of ignorant innocence.

Washing up is really irritating – even more so than usual, that is.

My elderly glasses are really uncomfortable, at least they are after a fortnight.

Boiled rice and (ready-chopped) vegetables with sauce (out of a bottle) and (ready-grated) cheese on top is nicer than it sounds, but it gets monotonous, and creates more washing up (see above) than a vegetarian cook-chill ready meal.

Tesco vegetarian cook-chill ready meals are vile. Sainsbury’s vegetarian cook-chill ready meals are okay, but bland, and give me gas (anyone care to identify the additive responsible?). M+S vegetarian cook-chill ready meals are okay but tend to include pastry – difficult to deal-with one-handed. Waitrose vegetarian cook-chill ready meals are excellent but horribly expensive.

It’s a good thing I love toast. Sadly at present it has to be toast with small irregularly-spaced blobs of butter or jam, as actually spreading anything is quite beyond me.

It’s hard to believe I am normally someone who tries to look reasonably well-turned-out. Initially I had precisely one bottom-half garment I could get into, a pair of 1992 vintage tracksuit legs I normally wear as gardening trousers, and precisely one wearable warm over-garment, a baggy knee length woolly I normally use as a bathrobe. However, I have managed, with a little expenditure, to get past the bag-lady look this gave me. I have purchased a pair of navy blue perma-press polyester elastic-waisted trousers, a gents button-fronted cardigan, and an alice band. With my glasses perched on my nose, my shirt-tails untucked, my long hair floating loose like a frizzy chestnut halo, no bra (& enough bosom for this to be noticeable), and terribly sensible flat shoes, plus the perma-press-and-cardi combo, I now look like a comedy lesbian version of the classic absent-minded professor. I hope this is acceptable in the office – thank the gods it’s an office at Kew and not somewhere with, like, a dress code or something.

On Friday I had an appointment at the fracture clinic for a follow-up x-ray, which was apparently so good that they promptly (well, pretty slowly, actually – they were, pun absolutely intended, snowed under) whipped my plaster off and took out my stitches, and then put another plaster cast on. This latest one is mine till late January. My bare, slightly swollen and misshapen right forearm, with a puckered, bloodstained four-inch incision down the soft wrist side, was an extraordinary and curiously tragic sight to my eyes, but the consultant declared it looked “splendid” and told me to use my fingers as much as possible and to make an appointment at Occupational Therapy for my first physio session on Wednesday.

I would have liked to have seen the x-ray, but everyone was so busy, that first wildly icy morning of the Great Cold Snap, that I felt I had no right to take up their time. Now that I am over the worst I am finding this whole business weirdly interesting. I really wanted to see my own arm again, and examined it with compassionate fascination; sometime I’d love to see inside it, with the plate + screws added…