A thorny issue

At the allotment this morning, with finishing touches going onto the frame of the polytunnel courtesy of Polytunnel Maestro Andy, I occupied myself by watering, (using our new 30 metre hosepipe. Very exciting! Like wrestling with a green spitting snake!), hoeing the whole plot to keep the weeds at bay and planting out some of the many, many strawberry plants I've been growing on in the greenhouse. They've all got flowers and some have even got tiny, baby strawberries on them. I am secretly getting rather excited about having enough strawberries this year to make my own jam as well as eating for pudding and making icecream as we did last year.

Anyway, in order to utilise the even decreasing space on our plot, the strawberry plants were being planted in rows in the gaps between the raspberries. Whilst I was on my hands and knees in what is now officially the 'soft fruit garden', I crawled under the blackberry bush which is growing to marvellous proportions, in order to weed it.

And the bugger got me! There I was, scrabbling about, doing it a favour by tidying up its bed and it embedded a very long thorn deep into the tip of the index finger of my right hand.

'Ouch-kibibble!' I said, or words to that effect and maybe louder.
Andy investigated the injury. 'That's gone in quite a long way, hasn't it?' he said.
'Yes,' I squeaked, because by now I had watery eyes and my finger was throbbing as though it had been hit by a hammer.

We went home. I thought, I'm glad my dad isn't around to see this. He'd have me in an arm lock by now, gouging a two inch hole in the end of my finger with a sewing needle. I don't know why, but my dad enjoyed rooting out splinters and thorns and given that he was a carpenter joiner by trade and we grew up on my grandparents market garden farm which was rife with thorny fruit bushes, he had ample opportunities to indulge his whim. My siblings and I grew wise to this habit early on and soon learned never to divulge any splinters of thorns we suffered, sneaking to mum who dealt with them far more gently (her whim was ripping plasters off your knees).

Anyway, I had to get this thorn out because aside from the usual worry of my hand going gangrenous and dropping off when things like this happen, it b****y well hurt. My fear of losing bits of myself also stems from a childhood memory. My paternal grandfather, Grandad Hank, who always greeted us with a 'What-ho, chaps!', cut his thumb off whilst using a saw-bench in his workshop. He was cutting logs and instead of moving both thumbs as he guided the log through the saw, he moved only one and only realised the other had vanquished at the teeth of the spinning blade when he went to collect the newly-sawn log at the other end of the bench. Apparently, he wandered indoors and said something like 'What-ho chaps, I appear to have sawn off a thumb.' One of his six children was duly dispatched to the workshop in order to retrieve lost thumb and Grandad Hank was dashed to hospital where an attempt was made to re-attach it to his hand

Pretty good for the 1950's I thought, when this tale was relayed to me. Only it wasn't that good because thumb didn't take and was removed. (Presumably not with a sawbench this time.)

Grandad Hank later went on to develop diabetes. Only he didn't know this and an injury to his big toe, which he treated with Germoline (Germoline was Grandad Hank's cure-all), resulted in him having a double leg amputation about a year later. It was all very tragic for such an active man, God bless him.

You see what can happen when you don't deal with these things promptly???

Anyway, armed with a needle and a pair of tweezers, I began the task of extracting the thorn from my finger. It was tricky on many levels. Mostly in that I am strongly right-handed (unlike my dad and my daughter, both ambidextrous) which meant I had to wield the needle and tweezers with my left hand. I squeezed, I poked, I prodded. My finger got sorer and sorer. There was a lot of faffing about and very poor language given I am an English Lit graduate.

And do you know what I ended up doing? I ended up gouging a hole in the end of my finger, just like my dad would have done.

Which just goes to show that despite what we think, sometimes our parents do know what's best.

And now I am off to create Andy's birthday cake! (Which is going to be chocolate, basically).