After suffering a week long sinitus setback, I was looking forward to going super-hard this week, and finishing The Omega Sanction by Wednesday. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions (and babies, probably), and if you were to ask me my idea of hell, I’d probably say, “hospital.”
So hospital it was, and if you want to know how I ended up there, you’re in luck. If not, come back tomorrow when, with any luck, I’ll be postulating gaily about my New Song, which Omega Sanction preorderers might well get a rough mix off tomorrow morning, unless some other foul luck befalls my person and I end up back in hell.
So, anyway. A by-product of growing up in a place where there are two buses a day, and getting to those buses requires walking for half an hour, is you get really into short-cuts, and you have no fear of fields, or bushes, or gates, or walls, or spiked fences. You laugh in the face of barbed wire and broken glass, and you do all you can to get from A to B in the manner of The Crow, flight be damned. So when I found myself in East London with a half-hour wait for the next train home on Sunday afternoon, I decided I’d walk. And when my walk took me up a dead-end road, rather than walking back, I thought, sod it, I’ll climb that fence, and follow that river’s edge. And when I reached ANOTHER dead end, in the shape of some tall-blue fencing, and gridded metal, I thought to find a way through that also. After much of this, I found myself on the grounds of the new Olympic Stadium, following a fox. The fox had little fear of man, it seemed, and the grounds were deserted – just dead diggers, piles of bricks and earth, and the giant skeleton of what will be the 2012 Olympic stadium looming up above me like a prehistoric UFO. I don’t know why I imagined that the fox would lead me home, but there was something magical about it, and I often fancy that I am in a story. Of course it made sense. So I followed the fox, deeper and deeper into the grounds of The Olympics, and after a while I did indeed find myself close to where I wished to be. But between me and my destination was a 10-foot metal fence, topped with cruel spikes, fashioned like a 16th century monarch’s crest. I followed the fence along for a while, looking for an opening, or a way over, and presently it curled along a railway track, and became shorter in stature. Leaned up against it was some rubble, and I thought it clever of me to drag some concrete blocks up the side of that rubble. I clambered up that, and gingerly placed my left foot between two jagged steel flowers, and pressured off with my right. The pile of rubble and concrete collapsed beneath me, and the flower daggers tore through my left trouser, leg, and a little of the leg itself, swinging me backwards like a rag-doll, where I dangled in the breeze, painfully impaled, and in some shock, as trains sped past, honking.
So I dragged my self back up, and gingerly prized my leg out from the spikes, and collapsed backwards into the rubble and the concrete, and cursed my idiocy. But it still didn’t dawn on me that I could just retrace my steps and start off home again, without the “short” cut. No, I had to get over that fence. I followed that back a while, and eventually found a sweet enough looking spot, and built a ladder up the side of it, with some other bits of fence that were lying around, and managed to get over the thing, by falling into a tree, and falling out of the tree, and into a blackberry bush. I fought my way through that, and found myself, tragically enough, pretty much back where I’d started.
By the time I met my long-suffering girlfriend (who was looking beautiful and expecting a nice Spring-evening date) I realised that I was in some great agony, mostly around the neck/shoulder area, which only increased as the night went on. By midnight, it was so shocking in its intensity that it seemed that would have to go To Hospital, so off we went. 5 hours, two sets of x-rays, one injection of codeine and four increasingly professional opinions later and we were stood outside waiting for a taxi to take us home. At that point I announced that I felt sick, so my girl went off to get some water. On her return I was laying face down and bleeding on the pavement, leg twitching, and not quite sure how I’d gotten down there, so with the help of a kindly security man, we went back inside, where I was sick into one of those big grey egg-boxes they keep around for people to disscharge themsleves into.
Eventually we got home, glasses bust, egg-shaped rapidly-darkening lump on forehead, and I didn’t have a broken neck, which was good, but I did have some sprained neck muscle or something, that was making things like nodding, or moving, or lying down, or getting up, or swallowing so intensely painful that I was forced to make loud man-moans with some miserbale regularity, so my girl stayed home from work and fed me painkillers and lemon-flavoured water all day. That was awfully nice of her, I might have done something stupid like falling over in the shower and impaling myself on some taps otherwise. Today the pain is less intense, but I still can’t really do anything properly, and it dawns on me I was supposed to be recording The Omega Sanction‘s final song with Marvin and Example this afternoon, but what are you gonna do, eh? I guess we are going to have to be a little later than I’d liked, and for that I can but apologise.
So, yeah. I’m going back to bed now, and hopefully tomorrow I’ll be in less pain, and shall be able to do useful things like mix records, and send emails. In the meantime, I would be very interested to hear of foolish scrapes that you, dear reader, have gotten yourself into, as mine wasn’t even very funny, let alone entertaining. So, yeah. Tell me stories, And enjoy this beautiful day.
Share & Commen
STEAM 
ODB, The Ballad of Russell Jones:... 
