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For those of you who don’t think stone clearing is a job for a man, today I spilled my blood on the field and still carried on, like a rock obsessed Terry Butcher. I had flung a big stone from a distance towards the wall betwixt the fields, but hadn’t noticed the sharp edge of the flint that sliced into the top of my middle finger. I came pretty close to losing the entire finger tip (like so many witches before me), if by close you mean I got quite a deep slice into the pad of my finger. But if that tiny wound had turned gangrenous then maybe someone would have had to cut my finger off. I don’t know. I am not a doctor. I am a stone clearer.
To begin with I thought it was nothing, but then I felt the warm sticky blood that had once been inside me, start to seep out. And dribble down between my fingers. It was bleeding quite hard. I hardly even cried though.
I didn’t think I had anything to stem the flood (if a slow seep of blood can be considered to be a flood) but then I found a nappy in my coat pocket. I’d taken it out on our walk yesterday in case my son soiled himself (but then it rained and then we went home and it’s about day 4 since he last did a poo), so mercifully if was unused. I wrapped it round my finger and like the true professional that I am, I continued to broadcast to the world (almost 200 people were watching this live).
It hadn’t stopped bleeding 25 minutes later as I got home, but I cleaned off the blood and the dried blood and the mud from the stones that I’d still cleared and put on a plaster and didn’t even tell my wife what a hero I had been. Though I thought I’d better warn her about the bloody nappy in the bin in case she freaked out. That’s not something that you really want to see.
That was my typing finger. I needed to use the fingers either side to scroll through Twitter on my computer. I mean to type up my work.
I was filled with energy today for some reason, but it didn’t translate to getting writing done as I struggled to answer the question “Can a man be a feminist?” In 1000 words. It’s a more contentious idea than I had anticipated. So still a good chunk of the book to write.
