Daughter Number Four had a few friends in the house for a sleepover. We knew from experience that sleepovers don’t involve that much sleep: they are usually occasions for sniggering, loud conversations, jumping about the place and attempting to hide the evidence when something breaks or spills.
With all that in mind, Herself came up with the idea of dragging mattresses down to the sittingroom and letting them sleep there. They could watch Wicked on repeat while we could sleep relatively undisturbed upstairs.
And the plan seemed to be working. Herself went to bed and I opted to stay downstairs for a few minutes more, just to keep an eye on things.
Then my phone rang. It was Herself. She was so upset she could barely speak, but she eventually managed to get the words out. While preparing for bed, she had dislocated her knee.
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This has happened before. Or it used to. When she was a teenager, and in her 20s, she had dislocated knees, elbows and shoulders multiple times. It was a phase in her life that we had assumed was over.
But at least those experiences had taught her what to do. By the time I got to the bedroom she had, MacGyver-like, popped it back into place.
It was exquisitely painful.
There was nothing else that could be done then. I helped her lift the leg into bed and the sleepover downstairs continued.
The following day, a neighbour who is a physio called in and taped up her knee. I went to work, but not before extracting a promise from Herself to stay off her feet as much as possible. I will, she said. After I’ve had a shower.
[ Donald Trump could well be the loneliest man in the worldOpens in new window ]
Fun fact about shower screens made from tempered glass: it’s rare, but if there’s a change in temperature or if it experiences some knocks, the glass can react dramatically. Just as Herself was stepping out of the shower, one of the doors exploded. Glass flew everywhere (it took two days to clean up all the pieces), including into Herself. Miraculously, she wasn’t badly hurt: mostly scratched arms.
Naked, limping and now bleeding, she went into our bedroom to find her phone was ringing. It was her sister, calling to tell her their uncle had died suddenly.
Apart from the physical injuries, there was an odd mental load to deal with. Three dramatic events in short succession. Because our brains work largely through pattern recognition, there’s always an urge to try to make sense of this, to link the events together. To conclude that it was simply coincidence, that it was completely random, is slightly unsettling.
The strange sequence of events experienced by Herself is, on a personal level, rare enough. But increasingly, politicians have to deal with this kind of thing all the time. Random and chaotic has become the norm. Nearly every morning there’s a new dramatic development, quickly followed by several more, some contradicting the first one. We all know why.
You can read lots of analysis speculating what Donald Trump is up to. Is it deliberate, to keep every other country on the back foot? Is it egomania, greed or imperial ambition? Is it all of those things? Is he evil or just barking mad?
The reasons why are less important than the fact that every statement and social media post has to be taken seriously by every other country, while remaining aware that he may change his mind minutes or days later. For the leaders of our country, and all the others, this must be close to impossible to deal with. Every day they are forced to react to the bubbling slop of Donald Trump’s mind. The stress of that must be extraordinary. You wouldn’t blame them if, some morning, they opted to ignore it all and stay in bed. In the absence of any other obvious strategy, it’s worth a try.
