My hands are pathetic. Really useless. They are small and soft and very weak - I can never do things like open jam jars. I can lightly restrain a naughty toddler, (and even then I always favoured the under-arm “piglet” hold), but beyond that, I’ve got no grip at all. Even Sam - formerly the toddler I used to restrain - can now, aged 9, open bottle tops and jars that I cannot.
I don’t think of my hands as very feminine as my mother has the hands of a sailor, if that sailor also has a degree in fine art. Her hands are large and capable but also very artistic and she used them throughout my childhood to mend walls, fix the car, sculpt stuff, paint dainty pictures of cherry blossoms in bloom and attack the garden like Gertrude Jekyll - but make it special forces. My hands just don’t do that. All my hands can do is type and flick the occasional v-sign.
But I do sometimes have to do things that are not typing or flicking v-signs and I mostly don’t like doing these things because I know that at some point I will hurt my hands, bend a nail back or catch my finger in something. I don’t like this hesitancy because the image I have of myself is not someone who is incapable or weak.
Then one day I was in the garden centre and saw the most magnificent pair of rubber-coated “chore gloves”. I knew instantly that these were what I needed. For sometimes taking out the bins when Giles is away or clearing out dusty corners of the house, which inevitably will have something extremely dirty, sharp, heavy or otherwise hand-attacking in them. Also fantastic at the moment for clearing ice off the car or doing anything heavy-duty or gross outside, where you don’t want to get your hands dirty but also can’t afford to sacrifice any manual dexterity. They are life-changing and magnificent and I recommend them to you highly.
On another note, I slipped over on the ice today, while coming back from taking Kitty to school. I went down on my left hand side - bam - and after being helped up by a nice New Zealander man and seeing him on his way with a thank you, burst into tears. Is this normal for someone my age? I was very upset. But, then, it was terribly painful and not a little humiliating. Though I am quite looking forward to watching with horrid fascination the enormous bruise, which is even now blossoming on my leg. Every cloud!
This afternoon, when I go to fetch Kitty from school I am going to fill a bag from a local grit-bin and take it with me, shaking it in front of me like scattering rose petals before my own feet. I will, naturally, be wearing my chore gloves.
How about you? Enjoying the snow? Please leave a handy comment in the box below. A friend was telling me last night about what great comments I have on my Substack and I was, like: “I know.”
Yes Sophie - agree I'd love a good yarn with all the commenters here....
Esther, I slipped once on a rock on a beach, minding my friend's kids - and my god - the bruise. I was teary but covered because I was meant to be the grown up. There is something so shocking about a fall - the vulnerability of it - that causes us to weep. Also I HATE snow that has iced, ever since I wrote a car off in snow, trying to get to work back in 2009. My protestant work ethic could have killed me. One tip for jars - run under the hot tape, then grab a teatowel and use it to add welly - and whomp! They are undone - and you feel so STRONG. Lastly, merry xmas Spikers - here's to a great 2023. x
I fell down a flight of stairs a few years ago and bruised myself all over. I cried buckets at the time and then, when my lovely chiropractor was doing his very best to straighten me out agin, he jabbed a bruise a bit too hard and I ended up sobbing all over again to his utter mortification, and mine, poor man. I think that was pre-perio-menopause too. Now I sob uncontrollably at the good-news reels on IG, ffs, in addition to everything else.
Hooray for rubbery gloves (Furtwanglers in this house) and like Elizabeth I also have a set of scruffy stuff for the inevitable drain-clearing/garage scouring etc. Recommended.
I read a couple of other Substacks and always feel very sorry for the writers who have such dull comments btl, and so few comments too! Thank you for having such a great gang here, all of you mad, hilarious and shameless bunch of complete strangers, all of whom I’d like to talk to at a party. Happy Christmas you lot xxx