 'Let's Google him.' There aren’t many upsides to being a regular visitor to hospital, especially if you work there. This is the message I sometimes received from the nurses last year when I was in the Oxford JR to have my knee sewn back together.
This year, I ensured my regular summer bed on Ward 2A by breaking apart the other knee. I thought after a year of economic stagnation the situation might have deteriorated. Maybe the curtains hadn’t been washed since last July (my enduring memory of a year 2000 birth at RUH Bath was of bloodstains on the curtain. Not the one round the bed. The one at the window).
In fact the John Radcliffe Trauma Ward had been restaffing in Portugal and Ireland. Both nurses (one male, one female) were lovely and young and, I felt, wonderfully kind because they knew no better. Whatever has stood still in the UK over the last year, the equivalent has been going backwards fast in Portugal and Ireland – they’ve been manufacturing nurses they can’t afford to employ. The UK is taking advantage, especially as the UK salary of a first-year nurse is less than the same nurse receives in training while over the Irish Sea.
Staring at the clean curtains, and then the view towards North Oxfordshire and Chipping Mordor, I was mostly in sombre mood. Back so soon a second time, I wondered if there was something I hadn’t learned properly the first time. It might have been the inadvisability of applying logic to surgical situations. Calculating, for example, that every surgeon has his first solo job.
So thank god for anaesthetists, who take away all responsibility for rational thought. They apply the heavy medicine, and then make smalltalk until the anvil falls.
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a writer.’
‘Are you famous?’
I have a stock answer to this not unfamiliar question. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Especially among people who know who I am.’ This has the advantage of being both clever and true, and avoids the embarrassment of getting into actual numbers. (‘Hundreds? Thousands? Have you been on the telly?’)
But no, on this occasion oblivion was imminent and I thought blow it. I’m about to go under the knife, I may never wake up, so what is the value of elegant deflection at a time like this?
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Yes I am.’
Which were, probably, my last words, and contented I fell asleep.
Two hours later, when I woke up, the anaesthetist made a point of coming over.
‘We googled you while you were under,’ she said, and not in an unimpressed kind of way. I smiled. Probably the soulful morphine, but also because I did learn something the second time round. Self-deprecation is rubbish.
 but with cricket pads on Eleven months ago, I jumped high into the air to catch a cricket ball. When I landed, without the ball in my hand, I ruptured the patella tendon in my right knee. This meant that the top half of my leg was no longer connected, in any active sense of the word, to the bottom half.
I had an operation, and wore a leg brace for twelve weeks, but as a keen sportsman I know the strength to be gained from cliché. It’s how you bounce back. I could return stronger than I ever was.
Yes and no. After Christmas I got myself fit – a bit of running, a spot of cycling. I started the cricket season at the end of May and have been averaging a mundane but not unsatisfactory 30 or so. Yesterday, towards the end of the innings, I set off at a fair clip for my 45th run of the afternoon.
I ruptured the patella tendon in my left knee.
It was no consolation to recognise the drill: the ambulance on the field, the friendly paramedic called Kirsty, the ins and outs of Accident and Emergency before the taxi home at eleven pm after six hours on a trolley with a copy of Grazia magazine.
Rupturing a patella tendon, so the doctors and nurses said (again), is a very rare injury. In seven years the registrar hadn’t seen a single instance, until yesterday when he saw two in the same pair of legs. There is no accepted reason for the snap to happen, so inevitably the brain scrambles for connections – coffee not tea before the match; the ball I should have hit differently in the over before; the greater disaster from which this providential injury, in ways that I can never hope to comprehend, saves me. In six hours, Grazia long finished and forgotten, I imagined many alternate universes.
The over-powering feeling, ultimately, is the dread. Not because of what happened last year, but what would have happened tens of thousands of years ago. My heart knows this (although my brain picked it up from an episode of Timewatch) – the weak and injured will slip to the back of the herd, and are the first to be eyed by panthers.
I’ve seen programmes solving the puzzle of Neolithic skeletons, young in the bone and dying with no obvious sign of violence. With modern forensics, the cause always turns out to be the teeth or the joints. The teeth are bad so the creature couldn’t eat (this also applies to dinosaurs). Look – the knee joint has wasted away. The nomadic tribe does not wait for the injured.
The lions, the tigers, they know. They see me slipping to the back. All they need do is wait, and sometimes they don’t even do that.
 man on the boundary The ball is dark and already falling from the blue summer sky. Like a minor, tragic, ill-fated character in a futuristic totalitarian novel (set in the kind of world where adjectives spread berserkly) I am conditioned to run. I run. The ball is a long way to my right. The boundary rope is inches to the side of the soles of my cricket boots. If I leap and stretch out my hand the moment of glory will surely be mine.
Though watch the ball. I have to watch the ball! First rule of cricket.
Which means Im not looking where I leap. The foot lands and then the knee somehow snaps, with an audible crack. And my first thought? I have not caught the ball.
Later, when the ambulance is parked on the field (the driver stops respectfully on the non-playing side of the boundary-line) I learn I’ve snapped the tendon that connects the upper half of my leg to the lower half. This explains why I no longer have a visible kneecap, just an unpleasant depression where the kneecap used to be. Crystal, who is my personal paramedic from heaven (likes bicycling, It’s a Knockout and Ibuprofen, dislikes old ambulances, the night-shift and her knees) immobilises the leg and loads me onto a wheeled stretcher.
Oh well, I think. I’ve had a good run.
I recently had a reason to include the follwoing stats in a book of essays about to be published in Japan:
‘Research carried out at George Washington University has attempted to calibrate the injury risks of various different sports. The martial arts have the same injury rate as rugby football, about one per fifty hours of individual participation.
More dangerous sports do exist, like horse-riding and diving, but many other sporting pursuits are significantly safer. Basketball has one injury per hundred hours of participation, while running involves one injury per 200-400 hours. Surprisingly, given the intensity of the game, squash-players can expect just one injury for every 1000 hours of play, and tennis-players are even safer, with one injury every 1400 hours.’
Since my last serious injury (cruciate ligaments at stand-off for Old Bristoleans in 1993) I reckon I’ve played 25 (av. matches per season) x 80 (minutes per match) x 9 (seasons 1994-2004) = 300 hours of competitive contact sport. Six times the recommended dose (without even starting on the training, which is rarely uncompetitive because boys will be boys). I was due.
It seems to me the cure is not to stop competing, but to start competing in a different way. See ball, watch ball. Then instead of running, make a calculation that involves my current age divided by percentage of effort multiplied by the likelihood of injury. Equals: I may sometimes be guilty of pulling the leap.
I’m not Peter Pan.
 'beyond reasonable doubt' I was scheduled to make an appearance on Sky Sports News today to discuss England’s feeble capitulation in the last Test of the Ashes series. The interview was arranged on Friday morning.
The last time I was on, a couple of weeks ago, I was marking the three-year countdown to the London Olympics. I was there to give my views on whether British athletes could expect triumph or disaster, though I suspect my role was to make the case for disaster.
I am the Loss Correspondent. I am the why-oh-why man. Something must be done. Don’t know what? Ask me. Where are the medals? I know where to find them.
This is because in 2005 I went to Australia to look for the answers. They’re all in the book How to Beat the Australians, and I talk a lot of sense. That’s because I mainly write books, and not newspaper pieces. I don’t have to generalise wildly after every England up and down, or pretend that single defeats or victories interrupt the more meaningful curves of (under)achievement. Books are sense whereas papers are sensation.
This morning, when it looked as though England might regain the Ashes at the Oval, I was stood down. Sky decided to send every unit they had, plus the kitchen sink and the ticker tape, to the Oval. They decided that England regaining the Ashes on a sunny Sunday afternoon in South London was not the time for common sense.
And I completely agree with them. Rev up the open-top buses. Forget the underfunding and the lack of free-to-air television and the abuse of public space. England are the greatest. Knight every one of them. Even Ian Bell.
 'to be fair ...' The latest news from England’s leaky cricket camp is that before the Headingley duckshoot Freddie Flintoff declared himself fit. Captain Andrew Strauss, acting on the advice of doctors, disagreed and decided not to include him in the team. Given Flintoff’s participation at Edgbaston, where supposedly his knee felt no worse, that doesn’t seem very fair of Strauss. Given the opinion of the doctors, it doesn’t seem very honest of Flintoff.
This isn’t the only subject on which Flintoff and Strauss disagree. When interviewed, Strauss buys himself time to think with the thoughtful preface ‘to be fair…’. Flintoff, on the other hand, prefers a bluffer, salt-of-the-earth ‘to be honest…’
Both players have perfected their own preferred stalling mechanism through sheer repetition. Strauss is absolutely insistent, to be fair, that he’s being fair, although to be honest Freddie refuses to be outdone in how often he claims to be honest.
In Cardiff when Australia reached 674 for 6, and again at Headingley when England were flattened for 102, Strauss thought it fair to say that the Australians hadn’t played too badly, to be fair. Flintoff, on the other hand, has had to admit on many occasions that to be honest his knee isn’t feeling 100%.
As a general principle, is justice or honesty more important when making public announcements as an England player?
Who cares?
The philosophical is personal. Anyone who insists on prefacing every public statement with ‘to be fair’ casts doubt on their own fairness. They’re probably compensating for an inner tendency to be exactly the opposite, just as a public figure who overuses the phrase ‘to be honest’ is betraying the likelihood that more usually he thinks in falsehoods.
‘To be fair,’ Strauss will say on announcing the team for the Oval Test, ‘Ian Bell can be expected to provide the England team with the temperament and skills lost to us since KP’s injury.’
‘To be honest,’ Freddie may riposte, ‘I’m 100% behind Straussy.’
To be fair, then, Strauss has chosen his preface because he has a history of behaving unfairly, either standing his ground when caught or claiming catches when the ball hits the ground. Flintoff is dishonest (in a self-deluding way), and claims to be fit when one of his knees is so swollen it can be twisted into a sausage-dog at parties.
To be clear, at least we know where we stand.
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and Director of The National Academy of Writing in London. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed above. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below. I'll get back to you.
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