January was shaping up to be all fun and lovely – I'd signed up for Tai Chi and Kickboxing classes, I've got a new choir to go check out on Monday night, and I'll be moving house in mid Feb. All happy, smiley, and moving in the right direction.

Naturally there's always things that aren't ideal, such as the ongoing situation with the laptop (still no word back from Toshiba about that, despite a prompt). But on the whole I'd have to say I was optimistic about where things were heading.

And then last night at Morris dancing practise, we were in the 3rd dance of the evening… nothing too elaborate or stressful… but I felt this twinge on the back of my leg, as if I'd been shot by an air rifle. Immediately following that, it became rather hard to walk.

So yep, excitingly, I've pulled or torn a muscle or tendon or something in my right leg. Yee frickety haa.

Had the day off work and rested it today, and tried to get in for a doctor's appointment, but that proved harder than it sounds – it seems the stories you hear about the UK health system being shite are absolutely true.

I was already feeling a bit miserable about the whole thing because essentially this takes me out of the running for Tai Chi & Kickboxing until at least March I'd reckon (based on what the other morris men said, given their personal experiences of the same thing). But the bit that's really put me in a bad mood was the phone call I made to my Travel Insurance company in Australia.

I've never had to claim on any kind of insurance before, so I was kind of looking forward to finally getting some benefit from the seemingly ceaseless outpouring of money to cover the “what if's”, but this really didn't make me feel any better. The guy took all my details, policy number, and soforth, and then after I'd described my injury, he said “And what were you doing when you hurt yourself ?”. Evidently my case was somewhat unusual, because when I said “Morris dancing”, the guy collapsed into laughter for about a minute. Really loud. On the phone, to me.

I'll be the first to concede that yes, Morris dancing is a fairly silly activity to be partaking in (at least, that's the main reason *I* do it), but for fuck's sake – it's slightly unprofessional to laugh at the misfortune of someone who's clearly in need of assistance, ESPECIALLY when you're being paid to render that assistance. The least he could have done was put me on hold and *then* dissolved into laughter ? At the time I thought it was kinda funny, but then the more I thought about it, the less amusing I found it.

To make things less useful, he effectively said that I should just proceed with getting medical treatment, and keep any receipts and reports that come out of it, and then I can claim for reimbursement. So it doesn't really help that much at all, because there's no special arrangements with any doctors/hospitals, and I've still got to go through the arduous NHS procedure.

Ah well, I suppose if nothing else, I'll be able to do something else on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the time being.

2005-01-07 : There appears to be some vomit on my eiderdown.
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