First off, I tried bending the fingers with the aid of my undamaged hand, then I tried bending them without assistance, next I tried to form them into a kind of half-fist, and finally I pulled out Dr John Sledge’s I’m Not Angry, I’m Hurting from my jacket pocket and tested whether I could fold my fingers round it and bear its weight. After performing this final task with some ease I decided that maybe things weren’t as bad in dextral terms as they’d initially seemed. Home is the ground floor of a nice house on Broomfield Road which has been converted into two self-contained flats. The road runs adjacent to the park on its southern perimeter. The flat used to belong to my grandmother and now it belongs to me. Consequently, it has a dusty old chintz and velvet feel to it, but is spartan too, like the home of someone in two minds about the nature and possibilities of interior decor. And although by instinct I’m a small, shy, dozy creature, happy holed up, solitary, contained, in fact I get claustrophobic inside and prefer a place where there is no roof, only sky, and a high sky at that.
