In pieces

Well we finally bit the bullet and booked an impromptu week in a caravan somewhere in the midlands. It was very last minute. Fiona and I returned from our anniversary weekend in Edinburgh at about midday. Maybe its because I haven't been at home for most of August but we immediately got itchy feet... wouldn't it be great if we could just go away again said Fiona...and so while she popped over to the shop to buy a loaf of bread I logged on. By the time she got back we were booked to go. You know that was a flippant and rhetorically wishful statement that didn't require credit card use she said..Too late...an hour later we were on the M1 heading up country to a caravan park.

Now caravan parks are...well...parks with caravans on them and this one was largely inhabited by skin headed men with union jacks fluttering from their caravans and Staffordshire bull terriers straining at the leashes held in their hands. It was an English Deliverance without Burt Reynolds. As I drove in I could hear the banjo.

You know it was definitely a flippant and rhetorically wishful statement that didn't require credit card use she reminded me. It'll be fine I reassured her. The sun's out. We're in the country. Plenty of room for the kids to run about in the country sunshine. Lovely. Then it started to rain in biblical quantities. Ten minutes later and there was a hurricane strength wind to boot.

So what do you do in a caravan in pouring rain with gale force winds and the assembled cast of the English Deliverance peaking though their net curtains at you? A jigsaw of course! That is true caravan behaviour. Rain, wind, cup of tea and a jigsaw. A 1000 piece humdinger of a jigsaw that took up half the floor. It took us half a day to find the edges. I became obsessed...early morning to late evening I was on the floor looking for the piece with half a green leaf against a blue background...and that it how I lost the feeling in my left hand. Hours of sorting through puzzle pieces whilst leaning on my left hand led to pins and needles running up from my wrist into my fingers. It'll go when I stop puzzling I thought. It didn't. I stretched my fingers. Give it five minutes and it'll be gone. Only it didn't go away after 10 minutes. Or after 10 hours. It's been five days now and all feeling in my left hand has buggered off.

We survived the Deliverance but I may well have invented a new MS exacerbation. Jig Saw wrist.