At the fracture clinic, a nice young doctor (who looked about 20 – the world is run by peachy-faced people nowadays, but I suppose this is good because I certainly don’t want to run much of it) offered me the choice between having a plaster on my leg (a stookie, as we call it in Scotland) or “a moonboot, like the footballers wear”. I’d never studied footballers’ legs, injured or otherwise, but when he said that I could take it off to have a bath – what an easy decision! So I’m now moonbooted up and while I couldn’t claim that it’s hugely comfortable, it’s tolerable.

He also said that I could put weight on the foot to a limited extent, which was very cheering, because let me tell you, swinging around on crutches while keeping one foot off the ground is not as easy as it looks. Easy for a slender young man with good upper body strength, possibly. I am not that slender young man. Apart from anything else, it’s impossible to carry anything, which rather restricts one’s usefulness about the place.

“I can go back to work now,” I said.

“What do you do?”

“I’m an English teacher.”

“My mum’s an English teacher.”

“My son’s a doctor.”

A nice parallelism.

So that was all good. Now I have to see if I can hobble round the corner tomorrow morning to the house of a kind colleague who’s agreed to give me a lift to work; and then shuffle round the college all day from room to room with the necessary stuff.

The great thing about teaching is that it takes one’s mind off one’s pain and sadness. At least while it lasts. But I do miss our distant offspring.