A disconcerting feeling

IT’S TAKING the needle-bruises on my arms longer to vanish than the symptoms of my stroke.

Not that the symptoms have completely gone, you understand; I still have a little deadness in my left leg, although I’m no longer dragging it around like something extraneous to me.

All tingling sensations in both arm and leg have disappeared, though, and generally I seem to have come out of the other side a bad week – of stomach upsets and loss of appetite, of searing leg cramps and the dead hand of lethargy.

Oh, I still tire easily, of course – that’s probably going to take weeks, maybe months, more to overcome – but on the whole, I have to consider myself very lucky indeed to have got off so lightly!

Anyhow, today we ignore the dreadful weather and decide to visit the Pub, the Geriatrics’ Corner, and it seems ages since we last were here. It’s the normality of the place that I can’t get over. There’s Liam, behind the bar, greeting me with a quiet smile, as always; there’s the Times puzzle pages ready for our attention, there’s Al, our gardener and handyman, on his usual stool by the wall, there’s the clock over his head ticking away – all as if nothing had happened.

And it seems that, for the Pub, its staff and most of its customers nothing has happened; they’ve barely been aware of my absence, still less of everything I’ve been through.

For a moment, it seems as if time and space have somehow been bent out of shape. Can it really be that so much can have happened to one person, while leaving everyone else untouched?

It's a disconcerting feeling, I can tell you!