The Atavism

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Things I have fallen down

I am alive and more or less well in Rarotonga, with an amazing collection of landsnails to play with on my return to Dunedin. However, my oh so glib little remark about falling off a cliff before I left doesn't seem very funny now. I haven't, in fact, fallen from a cliff, instead saving my precipitous losses of altitude for a loose section of fossilised coral reef (makatea) on Mangaia, a sheer sided gully in Rarotonga's centre and slit trench dug through the volcanic basin of that islands second highest peak, Te Kou, in case its observation station was strafed by Zeros in the Second World War. None of these excursions left me with more than then barest of scratches but tramping boots, socks, tropical humidity and industrious microbes can do a lot with a little scratch. And so it was that I woke yesterday morning to a foot swollen red and white with bacterial activity. The fine folks at the Tupapa Medical Clinic patched me up and send me away with a course of antibiotics that have already lessened the swelling and the angry-looking-ness of my foot and I'm assured in a few days I'll be fine. In the mean time I am useless, spending a lot of other peoples money to sit in our unit and fester. I know there are worse places to be than 25 degrees of latitude north of a snow covered Dunedin but I simply don't have the constitution, or, lets face it, the complexion for sunbathing. You may expect to here more from me as a slide deeper in to being a grumpy old man but that's all for now.
Posted by David Winter 9:42 AM

0 Comments:

Post a Comment