Paying Ready Attention

It would be fair to say that when I first saw a platypus I got rather excited.  Spy satellite images would probably show me hoping from foot to foot and pointing.  It’s not that I was getting great views, far from it in fact.  It was just that I was seeing platypus.  In the wild.  In the flesh.  I’d quickly learned to drop the “duck billed” part of the name in favour of the shorter and more accurate version.  After all, there is no “eagle billed platypus” or whatever, so the duck billed bit can be shed without confusion. There’s just the platypus. And there they were, floating like slightly plump sticks on the surface of the water.   With a humpbacked dive they would disappear, until they bobbed, flat backed, to the surface and into view again.   I don’t doubt that the return of these living corks to the surface of the water was greeted with laughter and more pointing. And a good part of that laughter, that wonderfully positive fee...

On arrival brightly coloured birds greeted us.   They flew from the pressing woodland to the gutters, to the garden table and to the fresh leaved trees that hung over the cottage door.   They perched in hopeful anticipation of food, leaning forward, looking down at us, checking us out.   Red and green birds.   Red and blue birds.   Metallic blue-black birds.   Beautiful birds. Against a briefly blue sky, a Blackbird sang its spring song, an invitation to some, to others a warning of possession.   Its beak flared golden as the wind sheparded grey clouds across the sky.   Once the clouds were gathered in, a storm would begin. Inside the cottage there were clear instructions not to feed the birds. The King Parrots stayed most of the week.   The Crimson Rosellas visited most days, but never stayed long.   The Satin Bowerbirds fled the garden within minutes and never returned. The cottage is chilly, it smells empty...

It was, apparently, a Webber B fracture.   If it had not been for the fact that my ankle was hurting, I would have only been able to guess what part of my body that referred to.   In a disarming act of honesty, my GP admitted the same thing.   Dr. Google soon provided a more detailed answer. If you looked at the X-Ray you could see a faint line, running across most of the bone, just up from the base of my left fibula.   But you had to look really, really hard.   It did not occur to me at the time to ask if this counted as a broken ankle.   Was it just a cracked bone?   And is a cracked bone a broken ankle? How much of a break does it need to be before it counts as a real break?   I remain ignorant on this issue. I had been running back from dinner with H, racing Sal and P back to the room.   A classic “it seemed like a good idea at the time” sort of activity.   Somehow I managed to overlook the fact that it was basically dar...