Diary Entry, August 9th 2006

Dear Diary,

Today my back hurts and I have an inexplicably itchy nose.

My back hurts because when I was nineteen years old and in Australia I took it upon myself to jump off a fifty foot waterfall and I landed funny, crushing the three vertebrae at the base of my spine. I passed out in the water and was rescued by a man with blue eyes and a wooden necklace, and was driven to the hospital by some hippy blokes with an elaborately painted camper van and strange hair.

I lay in a bunk bed for two weeks taking Nurofen by the fistful and being forced to smoke very strong weed by the aforementioned hippies who had kindly taken it upon themselves to look after me. After those two weeks I could stand up for small lengths of time, and so deemed myself fit for making a twelve hour bus journey down the coast, where my friend Jenny was waiting for me. I survived the bus journey by taking painkillers until I passed out, then waking up and taking more painkillers until consciousness buggered off again. I have one memory of that trip, and that is finding a payphone at one of the petrol stations, calling Jenny and just crying and crying.

I had a bruise that went from my shoulder blades down to the backs of my knees, and one covering my whole chest as well. Once during that time I was standing on a beach somewhere in a white string bikini, which is an item of clothing one generally feels fairly self-conscious in anyway, and realising that there was a crowd of people standing behind me whispering. This is a less than comforting thing to suddenly become aware of whilst wearing nothing much at all, but I was relieved to turn around and discover that they were in fact all trying to work out what the hell could have happened to me to create such psychedelic bruising. It is probably wrong in some way that I would prefer people to be staring in horror at my arse because it looks like I have been beaten relentlessly with a metal crowbar than have them staring in amusement because it looks like I have been beaten relentlessly with the ugly stick, but such is the curse of our age.

Since then, though, it has steadily become better and better. There have been couple of moments of back-related agony, like the time I slipped on some stairs and bumped down them on my arse (I went white and nearly threw up) and the time I was in a show at the Edinburgh Festival and woke up one day and couldn't walk, and we had about eight more nights of the show to go (I crawled into a taxi - actually crawled - and went to a physio and then to a chemist), but for the most part it is very well behaved. The doctor said I am 'of good flexibility for a girl my age', which I took to mean 'bendy as hell and probably shit hot in bed' (note the 'probably', I am not having nor have I ever had sex with my doctor), and it doesn't plague me too much.

Sometimes it gets all sore though, Diary. Dagger-stabbing pain. Like on CSI, where you can see the pointy pointy knife ripping through the pink squishing organs, it hurts like I imagine that might. Except without the death, and also without Gil Grissom saying poignant things about The Nature Of The Universe just before the credits. Today it is painful, and I am attributing it to the fact that I wore very high heels twice last week and I usually wear flip-flops. I am also attributing it to the fact that I am all excited about my holiday and the universe is trying to even things up a bit. I hope so much it stops with the stabbing pain before the twenty million brazillion hour flight this weekend.

I have no idea why my nose is itching.

Lots of love
Léonie