Spac leg

I was at Tom Paulin's house talking about the contents and acknowledgements pages which I'm helping him to put together for his book of essays, Crusoe's Secret. I mentioned that Jamie McKendrick hadn't got in touch with me yet. Tom had recommended me to Jamie and passed on my mobile number. Apparently he and his partner, Xon de Ros, had some computer-related work that they needed my help with. As synchronicity would have it, Jamie called a few minutes later.

Once I finished up with Tom, I walked down Abingdon Road to Jamie's house. Xon (which I later found out is pronounced "chon") answered the door. She took me upstairs to Jamie's study. He's a poet, published by Faber. His room was suitably lived in. It was amiably chaotic. My job was to help him transfer some files from his old, chugging laptop to his much newer Toshiba. It took us more than a couple of hours. As his desk was so cluttered, I set up my laptop on the floor to receive his files disk by disk on floppy. Then I burnt them all on to CD and copied them on to his new laptop.

Perhaps as a result of all my crouching, kneeling and sitting on the floor, my circulation was beginning to go. When I was sitting on the chair with my laptop on my lap, helping Xon to combine two jpegs into one, I began to get pins and needles in my left leg. I flexed it a little bit, but it didn't go away. When I got up to fetch something, my leg became totally spasticated. I almost fell over. I guess it was like having multiple sclerosis momentarily, or feeling unsteady on my feet like an old fogie. It was quite scary, but funny as well. It was like my leg was stuck in a bucket of gluey quicksand. I felt like Mr Soft from the Softmints advert: "Oh Mr Soft, why won't you tell me why the world in which you're living is so strange?" It went away, eventually, but it's still feeling a little tender a few hours after the event.