Ted’s blog

Warning: this blog may contain disturbing imagery

Do you remember when your mother said that you should always wear clean underwear in case you got into an accident? Well, she was right.

Roughly a month ago I was cycling around Chorlton Water Park in a vain attempt to lose weight. My stomach had become so large our neighbours were paying me to let their children bounce on top of it. Cycling seemed like a pretty easy way to lose weight – you can sit down all the time, ignore every traffic law and scare dogs. I dislike dogs. They can smell my fear.

So I was cycling along by the water’s edge when me and my stomach found ourselves veering wildly to the left. Braking in a panic and thinking I had a flat tyre, I managed to crash with all the dignity of a hippo waterskiing into a patch of nettles that God saw fit to place just where I didn’t need them.

Back then I had some form of life, career, and future, so I tried to get up but, disappointingly, fell back down again into the nettles. I then proceed to bask in the painful foliage for half an hour like the world's stupidest woodlouse, using cuss words I invented especially for the occasion. I wouldn’t recommend rolling around in nettles, unless you favourite nightclub is called 'the Savage Garden' or 'The Dungeon".

Quite a few people passed me by in the next half hour but none seem inclined to help. One bloke even gave me a saucy smile, obviously thinking that I was trying out a radical, new pick-up technique. If my ancient gypsy curse was effective, his nose should have fallen off by now.

Eventually two good Samaritans stopped – an off duty policewoman and a triathlete. I realise this sounds like the start of an obscure and, potentially, very dirty joke, but it’s actually true. They very kindly made sure I wasn’t dead and called me an ambulance.

Unfortunately I had collapsed at the furthest point from civilisation you can be in Southern Manchester, apart from Longsight. The ambulance had to park a mile up the road and a couple of very unhappy drivers were required to lug their equipment all the way to where I was still rolling around in nettles and crying like a little girl.

Following words of encouragement such as “Get up, you little ****” they finally realised that I couldn’t move. A compromise was reached where I had to slump back, spread eagled into an angled wheelchair and get pushed along a rocky path back to the ambulance.

I refer you back to your mother’s wisdom at the start of this blog. I was wearing cycling shorts and, dear God, do I look awful in them. However, they feel like a nappy which reminds me of a happy childhood when a Farley's Rusk could keep me going for days. But here I was, a semi-grown man, wearing ill-fitting cycling shorts, in a wheelchair, legs akimbo, being pushed past a motley collection of joggers, dog walkers, and general neighbourhood perverts. They must have thought it was a warped promotional exercise for shrink-wrapped mini-vegetables.

Eventually I make it to hospital where a student nurse had 23 unsuccessful attempts at sticking a needle in my arm, inadvertently giving me a permanent tattoo that looks like a frowning leopard. I was pumped full of drugs and sent on my way through a crowded casualty department full of drunk students. For some reason they found it funny to see a man in cycling shorts and a visibility jacket at 1am in the morning.

Apparently I had something called labrynthitis. One of the symptoms of which is that you are unable to pronounce the word ‘labrynthitis’. I tried it once and had to have by tongue extracted from front teeth. But the main symptom is an inability to do anything apart from lie down on a bed and complain vehemently about daytime television. Otherwise you get so dizzy and so violently ill that you actually throw up food you haven’t eaten since the 1970s. At one point I recognised an entire Bernie Inn menu.

Four weeks on and I am still in the process of recovery and have burned the cycling shorts. Of course, this blog is meant to have some relevance to design/writing etc and having lain on my back for four weeks I have come up with some interesting thoughts:

1) I need to plaster the ceiling
2) Where do those brown stains on ceilings come from?
3) Why aren’t ceilings more interesting when we spend so much time looking at them?

If you have any answers please tell me one the thing below. Next time I’ll be talking about mouth ulcers.