So it’s now a week since the doctors removed the Zimmer Bar that was holding my left pinky in position, and I am slowly trying to go back to normal.
Yesterday I went to the baker, to buy some bread, and discovered that as I can’t properly close my left fist, I can’t hold the change. The lady in the shop handed me the money, I tried to close my hand over it, and I dropped a shower of coins on the floor. This is how things stand now, and how they will stand for quite a while.

I can write, though, even if I find it extremely hard.
Which is not good, considering I have to deliver 50.000 words by Christmas, and roughly 75.000 words for the end of January. But this is not so much a physical thing as a mental thing. The forced idleness of the past month has slowed down my systems, and the various worries connected with my broken hand have weighed me down.
I’ll need to get back in the saddle.
There are contracts and deadlines to be respected.
In one week I went from no show to 1000 words per day.
I’ll need to keep increasing the output. There’s bills to pay.

In the meantime I am reading a lot, to keep the worst dark moods at bay, and I find I am not feeling like fiction. In the last years, my non-fictyion reading has been mostly about history, nature and travel, and after Rory Stewart’s walk through Afghanistan, I am now reading Thinking on my feet, by Kate Humble – a book about walking and running as a way to focus our thoughts and center ourselves, so to speak.
It is still built as a travel book, detailing the author’s walks, hikes and runs around the country and the world (Humble’s a documentary film-maker).

I am a great believer in the power of a good walk as a tool to finding our balance and putting our brain into gear, and I’ve started walking again, after the long summer months (too hot to have a proper walk) and the long month after the accident, when my hand was busted and my ribs were creaking when I breathed.

Now I’m back on the road, so to speak, and it’s always nice to have a good book about walking at hand.
Humble’s book walks the line (aha!) between memoir and self-help, and it’s simple, straightforward and quite interesting.

I will probably follow it with Simon Reeve’s Step by Step.
Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to use my feet to compensate the bad time my hand is giving me.