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One of my biggest fears is dying or being badly injured in a pointless and/or amusing way. To be fair, if I don't die and get injured in a stupid way I can probably get some comedy out of it. But if you die in a stupid way then that's all that people remember about you. Like when Nigel Farage was killed in that plane crash when he own banner got wrapped around his plane. Unlucky for him, but imagine how bad things would have been for the UK had he lived.
Today I briefly feared I was losing the sight in one eye due to an unlikely mishap. Although it would have led to a book and show called "Can I Have my (eye) Ball Back?" it would have been annoying to lose depth perception, especially given the mundane stupidity of what had happened to me.
I had just loaded the dishwasher. It's the part of my life that I take most pride in and I hope my dishwasher skills will be what I am remembered for. My wife doesn't think I load it very well and thinks she can do it better (even though she often puts the big plates in the middle where they catch on the spinners and the chopping boards next to each other so they stick together and don't get clean). She is likely to outlive me and I fear that once I am gone that not only will her reign of dishwasher loading terror begin, but that she will also wipe my achievements from the record books and pretend I was never king of the appliance and that she always did it. and all tales of my prowess will be lost to mankind. There comes a point in a marriage where you are only staying alive to stop the other one gaining ascendancy.
I'd done a great job of loading (let the records show - should have taken a photo to prove it). I popped in the dishwasher tab, but as I closed the little tablet drawer, something got caught in it and a fleck of liquid of food flew up from the device and landed directly in my left eye.
It stung so much, straight away, that I assumed (probably correctly) that the plastic of the liquid tablet had been caught in the mechanism and been pierced and some of the corrosive blue dishwasher fluid had been projected into my face, like burning oil from a trebuchet.
That was not good. It hurt and also if that dishwasher tablet can (occasionally) get baked on crud off an oven dish, then what can it do to a human eye?
Obviously I rushed to wash my eye out with water and squirted it with eyedrops, but it felt like the projected invader was behind my eyeball, slowly burning its way to my optic nerve.
Was I going to spend the rest of my life wearing an eye patch? Would I be able to play tennis again? What would I say to people when they asked me what happened to my eye?
I walked the dog in the crepuscular glow of the eve, my eye not quite as painful now, but maybe all the pain cells had been destroyed, looking at the world with either eye to see if the sight in the non-dishwasher fluid one was better than in the other. It did seem like my non-affected eye was seeing stuff a lot clearer.
My left eye was fading and all I could think about was that this would be the most annoying reason to be partially blinded. I'd be cursing my luck for the rest of my life. And I wouldn't even be able to really complain because I'd still be able to see out of the other eye. No one would have any sympathy.
Luckily the eye got better on its own. Or seemed to. But perhaps tomorrow I will wake up and the inside of the eye will have been burned out and it will look like the preserved eye of the gunpowder plotter that was in the British Museum.
Hopefully I will be OK (I am writing this tomorrow and it's fine so far, just so you don't worry).
Today's Newsround is about the State of the States
Watch here
RHLSTP episode SIX HUNDRED went up today (though there have also been one hundred non RHLSTP branded Edinburgh Fringe Podcasts, about 16 specials that didn't get a number in the days I thought it didn't count if it wasn't in the LST and three that never got broadcast - plus 170 book clubs, so it's closer to 900 episodes).
The non-broadcast eps, if you're interested were with Ricky Wilson (off his face - and when you look at some of the drunken ones we've put out, this should give you an idea of how bad it was), Michael Eavis (didn't know what a podcast was and kept referring to something that he then wanted us to take out, making the pod uneditable) and Richard E Grant (who knows?)
If I can outlive these motherfuckers I will put these up. Apart from the Ricky Wilson one. No one needs to hear that
Delighted that this meaningless landmark show is with my new friend, the wonderful Fatiha El-Ghorri.
Listen here.We can't really talk about the project we worked on together and Fatiha only nearly gives the game away once.
