Not a lot of people know you can borrow a wheelchair from the Red Cross for free if you find yourself incapacitated with a broken toe or worse. So my first driving trip last week after ye accident was to Red Cross and thank goodness I did. I can move very slowly round the house on crutches, but am not safe outside. Too slow, terrified someone will stand on my toe, and not very stable.
And so to Tesco, with Richard pushing the chair and Edward refusing to do that (though he loves whizzing round the house in it) and on trolley duty. I felt a little like Boadacea urging on her troops as we whizzed round the aisles and gondolas (did you know that's what the lines of shelving are called? My sister Min, who used to manage a supermarket in Jersey and now runs a flying school near Perth, Australia, told me that), avoiding other people's children and ankles. I know my way round, which neither R nor E do, so it was a pretty brisk trot around the supermarket but how funny is it the way people react to someone in a chair.
I'd put red lippie and a jaunty scarf on especially not to look, you know, properly disabled, but still people glanced, once they'd been jabbed sharply in the shins, with a strange kind of glazed pity when they saw what/who had attacked them. Maybe it was the red lippy, come to think of it. Did I look like a kind of deranged Hollywood ex-starlet who doesn't know it's not 1943? I tried staring back at them with assumed confidence, or waving my arms around to show I'm not totally disabled, even talking loudly and intelligently, but the more I think about it the more that would have confirmed their first impressions. A crazy, arm waving, opinionated has-been. Helped along by my son's refusal to come anywhere near me in the chair, and R's breaking of the speed limit as we charged for the tills, indicating that he wanted to get me out of polite society as soon as possible.
Next challenge: negotiating the posh shop of Hambledon in The Square, and Winchester's world famous Christmas market.
And so to Tesco, with Richard pushing the chair and Edward refusing to do that (though he loves whizzing round the house in it) and on trolley duty. I felt a little like Boadacea urging on her troops as we whizzed round the aisles and gondolas (did you know that's what the lines of shelving are called? My sister Min, who used to manage a supermarket in Jersey and now runs a flying school near Perth, Australia, told me that), avoiding other people's children and ankles. I know my way round, which neither R nor E do, so it was a pretty brisk trot around the supermarket but how funny is it the way people react to someone in a chair.
I'd put red lippie and a jaunty scarf on especially not to look, you know, properly disabled, but still people glanced, once they'd been jabbed sharply in the shins, with a strange kind of glazed pity when they saw what/who had attacked them. Maybe it was the red lippy, come to think of it. Did I look like a kind of deranged Hollywood ex-starlet who doesn't know it's not 1943? I tried staring back at them with assumed confidence, or waving my arms around to show I'm not totally disabled, even talking loudly and intelligently, but the more I think about it the more that would have confirmed their first impressions. A crazy, arm waving, opinionated has-been. Helped along by my son's refusal to come anywhere near me in the chair, and R's breaking of the speed limit as we charged for the tills, indicating that he wanted to get me out of polite society as soon as possible.
Next challenge: negotiating the posh shop of Hambledon in The Square, and Winchester's world famous Christmas market.
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