Sometimes limping

I slept unusually well, and started the day feeling fresh. A dozen of us were at the St Catherine's Eucharist, and most stayed for coffee and chat afterwards. I went straight from there to collect this week's veggie bag, and got home in time to see Clare with a delicious fish pie ready to go into the oven for lunch. 

Afterwards, I recorded next week's Morning Prayer audio and reflection, then edited and turned it into a video slideshow and uploaded it to YouTube. On this occasion, the whole task, apart from preparing the texts, took two hours. It usually takes longer.

Then I went to the Co-op for the week's grocery shopping, a rather heavy load to carry around in a basket to the checkout, but noticeable because right ankle joint pains were suddenly acute enough to make me limp. My knee joint gets out of alignment and causes this to happen. It seems quite random. Sometimes I can correct the alignment, other times not. The joints aren't especially worn, but the connecting muscles either get too stiff or too lose, it's hard to know which. I think it's related to sitting on an upright chair at a table when working on the computer. 

There seems to be no particular position or posture which prevents my legs from mis-alignment. I need a treatment from Kay, who's a sports injury specialist, not just to sort me out, but to learn from her how tackle this sustainably. There's an element of pressure on a nerve in this. It doesn't add to the ankle pain but affects the whole body, like a mild shock. It's quite exhausting when it happens, but with a little rest I soon recover. 

The only thing I couldn't get on the shopping list was sunflower oil. A side effect of the war in Ukraine cutting supply chains. None in stock. Last week, I bought a bottle at Tesco's. I limped straight home rather than divert to buy some there, and after a cup of tea and sit down, ventured out again. This time my ankle gave me hardly any trouble. It's hard to figure out what had change in the half hour between excursions but a relief nevertheless. Tesco had lots of bottles of sunflower oil, even five litre ones. I think the reason for this abundance is to do with the Tesco business brand having a big chain of supermarkets in Hungary, also a producer of sunflower oil. While I was there I also bought a bag full of cans for the parish food bank offering. It was pretty heavy and I was relieved this didn't affect my walking, as happened earlier.

After supper I went to bed with my Chromebook and watched another 'Inspector Borowski' episode for a couple of hours, looking at the phenomenon of sexist and right wing chat rooms on the dark web, and the kind of pathetic loners these attract.. This series three is very up to date in its observation of contemporary social pathologies and the internet. There's a lot of nastiness out there in the virtual world, and some of it translates into horrifying incidents in real life. It's collateral damage from our excessive dependency on the benefits we think are conveyed on us by our use of digital tools. Any kind of dependency is not good for us as it robs us of creative freedom to shape our lives and decisions without us realising. Just because it conveys the illusion of great convenience and immediacy of communication doesn't mean there's no price to pay. When will we start to say 'enough'?