Show Some Backbone - Monday

‘Oooh, dear. What happened to you?’ Asks my chiropractor, with an unwelcome chuckle. A tsunami of sarcasm isn’t best directed at someone who will have you bent double in your underpants shortly, so I just grimace and remind him I wouldn’t have booked an emergency appointment at £45 a pop, without a whole lot of agony.

I hobble awkwardly in to the waiting area, where two other people are slumped in the leather armchairs. Clearly hypochondriacs. I shuffle straight to the upright chair and lower myself gingerly to the squab. I look like one of those losers who ship up at A and E of a weekend, with a foreign objet wedged up their nether regions. Only I didn’t fall on to the vacuum cleaner nozzle while doing the housework naked - at least not this time…

‘What happened?’ Asks the chiropractor wearily, once I’m in the treatment room and down to my underwear. Socks still on. There’s no way they are coming off until he straightens my spine. It took my wife several goes to put them on me and she’s usually telling me to take them off when I’m on the bed.

‘I just woke up like this.’ I tell him pathetically. If he asks if I jumped amorously off the wardrobe the previous evening, I’ll take my business elsewhere - at least when I’m able to walk without resembling Notre Dame’s most famous bellringer.

‘Try and bend forward to touch your toes.’ Suggests the man softly.

He might as well ask me to levitate and do a trick with stale loaves and fish leftovers.

‘My, that is tight.’ Says the bone-bender. No shit Sherlock. ‘You’ve got yourself in a bit of a pickle haven’t you?’ He continues, as I resist the urge to verbally flay him with derision.

‘Now just try and relax.’ Says the man as I lie face down and he tugs at the waistband of my underpants. If anything I tense even more, and that’s before he really shafts me with  a bill most high-class hookers would baulk at on a cost per minute, while bent over making animalistic sounds.

‘This is going to take several sessions.’ Suggests the chiro, as the treatment table rises with a soft swishing. Now why am I not surprised? I’ve known for years that alternative treatment practitioners in the private sector have a vested interest in stringing out your treatment for several return visits. They need repeat business. The polar opposite of my experience with NHS staff.

I still recall, with bitterness, the clueless NHS physiotherapists my GP sent me to see after several bouts of back trouble. Bored-looking middle aged women, with cheaply photocopied handouts I could have obtained on the internet, spent most of the sessions filling out my medical history on their laptops. They never once touched my lap, or asked me to take my top off.

After several pointless sessions they were just eager to sign me off their caseload, with less hands on than a children's rugby game. One did refer me to a pensioners’ pilates class. It’s a sign of how desperate I was to break the pain/spasm/pain cycle that I attended. Some memories you wish you could erase forever. My mother disorientated in the old people’s home, father in a hospital bed, mute and terrified post-stroke - and a cobwebby crotch in a gaudy-coloured leisure suit, three foot from my face. ‘You might want to move up the mat a little Mabel, you’re a bit near that gentleman’s head.’

‘How’s the housing market?’ Asks the chiropractor, as he instructs me to roll on to my side and to clutch my opposite shoulder. Does he really want to know? Or is it just distracting small talk to fool me into relaxing, before he tries to get several vertebrae to audibly explode, like popcorn in a microwave.

I sometimes wish I could keep my identity secret from the pain-givers, but this guy, my dentist and my bank manger all know what I do. I give him a property platitude.

‘Deep breath in.’ He instructs, as my buttocks clench. ‘ A little discomfort coming.’

As I’ve been predicting.

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Plasma Scream - Monday

I feel the sharp tug of the blade and hope against hope it won’t bleed. You don’t need a shaving cut when you are already running late and facing a meeting you’d rather not attend and a day you’d rather not have. I wait for those few seconds that taunt the unwary bristle-cutter, just long enough for a little hope to bubble to the surface, before the claret does.

‘Shit, shit, shit.’ I shout in anguish as the surprisingly vibrant crimson liquid, given how tired I feel, oozes through the snowy shaving foam.

‘Are you alright in there?’ questions my wife, as I stare morbidly fascinated at the blood pumping from the cut. ‘Did you want the laxatives or the Diocalm?’

‘Different type of shit.’ I mutter, as I wipe at the place in question and a tomato sauce-like smear ruins the perfect juxtaposition of virgin white and little bleeder.

‘Have you cut yourself?’ She asks unnecessarily as I slope from the en-suite with a piece of coagulating toilet paper welded to my face. The options for lacerating sarcasm are endless but there’s been enough slicing for one morning.

‘Do you want to wear a blue shirt rather than the white?’ Asks my wife, as I try gingerly peeling the hardened tissue from the wound after breakfast. ‘Does it make any difference?’ I ask testily, as a sharp pain makes my eyes water when the temporary fix parts company with my face. I wait again, peering in the hall mirror pessimistically. It takes a fraction longer, but the blood starts to flow again.

‘Do you ever get the feeling someone up there doesn’t like you?’ I say rhetorically, as I hurry up the stairs again to the bathroom. I’m running short of time and my heart is thumping by the time I make the last step. Something guaranteed to keep the wound open and flowing. A fact confirmed as I look in the shaving mirror again, to see a tear-shaped rivulet of red weeping down my face. Too many metaphors to choose from, I think gloomily, as I wonder how stupid a plaster will look and how much grief I’ll get walking in to the meeting sporting a flesh-coloured face-appendage. Salespeople are not renowned for their compassion.

‘Nobody will notice.’ Speculates my wife absurdly, as I come back down with a blue shirt and an even bluer demeanour. I’ve opted for another scrap of tissue, one that has now darkened to a crusty brown hue, rather than a plaster. I hope to peel it off in the car park and pray some clotting has formed, other than in my heart arteries, by then.

Bad enough facing a bunch of braying colleagues, keen to fall on the weakest pack member to deflect from their own failing and sales figure, but I have a string of valuations later in the day. Like the clean shoes fetish I have and the matching shirt, suit and tie obsession, I know the slightest perceived slight or oddity can cost you the business. Look wrong, or look at the wife, daughter or boyfriend wrongly and the business flows away faster than an opened vein. It’s a bloody nightmare.

‘Hah. Who smacked you in the mouth?’ Laughs H my poison dwarf of a rival manger, as I slide into the meeting room, absurd circular plaster on my face after a failed attempt at a clean removal of the blotting paper-like bog roll, in the car vanity mirror. The blood took a little longer to rise to the surface but it came in the end.

‘You’re late.’ Snipes the bean counter from the head of the table, lifting his weasel-featured face from the laptop just long enough to see who was going in the bad books. Loss column presumably.

‘Angry punter?’ Asks H loudly, to a round of laughter from the table.

‘Who’d you shaft?’ He continues on a roll, other than the half- eaten bacon one in front of him. ‘Buyer, owner or their pet?’ I’d like to impale him with a suitable implement, but the budget hotel only supplies plastic cutlery and my wit is no sharper than my razor.

Cuts like a knife.