Leith on life: Walk a mile on my crutches

Be disabled for a bit. I urge it on you. I’d recommend, for instance, tripping down a short flight of stairs in answer to the needy cheeps of a tumble-dryer asking to be emptied. If you can, arrange to strike the edge of the second step down with the heel of your sock, just where it’s most worn, so that you travel from upright to awkwardly prone with a dispatch so startling that it causes you to cough with surprise before you yelp with the distinctive pain that installs the inner certainty that one of your metatarsals is done for, and that you’ll shortly be trying to find ways of claiming you’ve suffered a football injury.

Why do I press this on you? Partly through retributive sadism, and partly because before it happened to me, three days ago, I had a very callow appreciation of what a privilege to stand up and walk about the place at will it really is. At first, the loss announced itself in an abstract way. I sat in the cellar thinking: “This may be a problem.” But, since I was then sitting, the problem was unrealised in any concrete form.

And, in fact, since I ascended the stairs on my knees and—after a brief session Googling waiting times at the local A&E (“Why are you messing about on your phone? I’m trying to sleep”; “Sorry. Shhh...”)—decided I could live with the pain and slipped into bed beside my wife, it remained in the abstract.

It became concrete when, after a brief chat with the GP (“I’m 90 per cent sure that’s a sprain, but because of the terrifying noise you made when I poked your foot just there I’m going to suggest you get an X-ray”), I found myself in a conversation that went like this: “Did you drive here?” “Yes.” “With three children?” “Yes.” “And it’s just you?” “Yes.” “Huh. Well, you’re not driving back.”

The feeling of powerlessness when, moments after hopping into a consultation I was being trolled about in a wheelchair, made me giggle at first. Cast, crutches, rescue by saintly sisters-in-law... And then reality. Unfolding ahead of you like a million-petalled flower made of barbed wire. Complicated school runs for three children under six when I can’t drive. Or push a stroller. When I can’t carry my one-year-old up the stairs. When I realise I now need to clear a lot of mental space to remember which necessaries of any given task are in which room because nipping up two flights to collect a hairbrush is no longer the matter of a moment, and my younger ones will find imaginative ways of committing suicide while I’m about it. Nipping anywhere, in fact, is not an option. Nipping is off the table.

Here, suddenly, we are. And I am in the shallowest end of the shallow end. I’m going to spend six weeks hobbling and bitching, in not much pain (the fracture’s impressive, the agony less so), and take, when desperate, some taxis I can afford; and rely, when stretched, on the kindness of friends and relatives I have. And then I’ll be able-bodied again, for—with a bit of luck—20 or 30 years.

But it’s a glimpse. It makes me think: everyone should try this. Go a mile in another man’s crutches. And it applies especially to those in public life. Until my own trivial misfortune it hadn’t occurred to me to think what it really means that politicians involved with disability welfare reform are able-bodied. (In Anne Begg, the Commons has its sole wheelchair user.) This is more than a debating point. I’m half-serious when I say making all MPs spend six weeks in plaster might be a worthwhile exercise. (You wouldn’t actually have to break their bones, though some will doubtless find the idea appealing.) To be hobbled, though temporarily, is to get a sense of the fractal spread of difficulty in the tiniest thing. It is to apprehend the sliver of a difference between being helped by a support network—and being up the creek. (Or, in my case, down the cellar.)