I WENT TO THE THEATRE THIS WEEK
SORRY ABOUT THE PHOTOS, FOLKS, BUT AS I SAID: STONED, BUT FEELING NO PAIN.
Have you ever wondered about those "bilateral talks" pollies fly to expensive places such as Aspen and Cancun to enjoy? It's an odd term. Then, this week I woke up to discover I had just undergone bilateral knee surgery – and nobody had talked to me at all while that happened. I don't think.
Anyway, it's by way of explaining why I haven't apparently been doing much this week. Well, not what you usually expect. I have been to the theatre, but it wasn't the Lyric, the Stables, the Wharf or Belvoir. It was, instead in a corner of St Vincent's Hospital in Darlinghurst that has not been designed by Alice Babidge. in fact I'd have to say it was rather plain. And the costumes. Well! They all looked like those scrubs things that actors wear on TV when they're running along corridors pushing cartloads of offal. No shortlisting in the Sydney Theatre Awards for them.
I now have prostheses – which I've always imagined to be noses and boobs – but in this instance are chrome and titanium, where my knees used to be and really quite Terminator. I was operated on by a wonderful surgeon who is as funny as a fit and an incredibly nice man as well as totally brilliant, not sure whether I can mention his name is Michael Neil so - shoot me. And all the hospital staff are wonderful too. Everyone, whether sticking needles in me or cleaning up after me, has been kind, considerate, fun, careful and awfully good at their jobs.
As Facebook friends will already know, the food is – in general – so terrible it’s almost good, in that retro 70s ways that probably should have died then too along with avocado bathroom suites.
But - and this is a good but – they have cornered the market in jelly chefs. They do the best jelly ever and I get to eat it every day, Twice. And I shall be sorry to leave tomorrow. I'm alive. They've fixed me. My heart has behaved and I am more grateful than I can say for living now and not in the days when destroyed knees meant embroidery by the fire in a rocking chair until someone took me out the back with the old horse and asked which one of us would like to go first.
We are awfully lucky and awfully complacent here in Straya. And Tony Abbott is no longer prime minister. That was worth a world of pain, and I got to watch it all unravel while stoned out of my trees. Such is life.
