Men are brave.
Right??
I mean, if we gave birth we’d do it in the pub whilst playing darts. Or at White Hart Lane on match-day. Right??

No, probably not.

Men are ‘brave’ but mainly only in really stupid ways that run so contrary to any form of common sense that you could replace ‘brave’ with ‘dumb’ and would lose no meaning.

Douglas Bader lost both his legs but got straight (almost) back into his Spitfire to go back to fight the bloody Lufthansa. Sorry, Luftwaffe. Brave.

John Cleese’s Black Night in Holy Grail? Can’t get much braver than that.

Arnie Schwartzenneger’s Terminator lost all its metal limbs, most of its printed circuitry, was running on ‘auxilliary power’, with one flashing red eye and half a hand, yet managed to last long enough to shoot that mutherfucker other Terminator. Wow. Brave. And although the pedantic and anal may think that a cyborg is not exactly a ‘man’ in the usual sense of the word, I’m going to apply the official post-feminist, PC definition in this case; that if it ain’t got tits it ain’t a gel.

Morover, that poor, wreck of Cyborg stood as a metaphor for all that is great about manliness. And he didn’t even drink beer.

Ok, I’m man ergo I’m brave.

So I’d ‘die for you’, lay my life on the line, take one for the team, stand in the way of the bullet, blah, blah, testosterone-blah.

But if it hurts, mummy, I don’t like it.

Yesterday morning I was being my usual hero, in a pilates class on the beach. Something ‘went’ in my left knee. Holy shit. Painful, searing, agony. Inability to bend it more than 82 degrees (yes, I measured it so I could assess any later progress of the probably terminal lesion, haemorhage, tumour, thrombosis). So walking was fine, bending it beyond that and HOLY FUCKING SHIT THAT HURTS.

Having played football (at a brilliantly high standard… ish) for years and years, I’d never suffered with knees as everyone else did/still does. No, shoulder’s shit, back’s bad, knees not just fine but downright gorgeous.

And now, its agony to bend.
So this was my (typically heroic, non-over-reactionary, very logical) thought pattern:

Fuck
won’t be able to play tennis
nor swim tomorrow
going skiing in feb, have to cancel
more ‘fuck’
could be bad,
amputation below the thigh
peg-leg
pirate
parrott
Pistorius

So one twinge and the next thing I’m an Afrikaaner blade-running murderer.

Though agony it indeed was. Though 3 hours later, the pain just went; gone, all normal, bendy, fine and dandy. How bizarre.

Happy heroic 2014

A xxxx