CET (Edmund) had his birthday on 19 March, right spung in the middle of Lent. He tried not to take it personally, but nevertheless annually griped that it wasn't FAIR! Why couldn't he have been born a mere two days earlier, on St. Patrick's Day, when Lenten discipline is off for the saint's festival? Was that too much to ask? (Um, as a matter of fact, yes, it was.)

I well remember the acrobatics required to bathe with a non-walking plaster cast on one lower leg, and I'm still amazed that I never hurt myself during either the entry or exit stages of the evolution. At first, I could get into but not out of the bath-tub, being too weak from the injury and the surgery, and too stupid from the drugs, to hoist myself as one does in the return phase of a bench-dip. After the crisis of convincing my brother to extract me, I stopped taking the pain-killers and thus regained enough capability to manage the task about every second day. Hair-washing was a doddle by comparison.

Note to file: Don't break any more bones, especially in the legs and feet. I'm too old now for that kind of lark.

When I read about chiggers, I think of Ontario's swarms of mosquitoes and blackflies and count myself lucky.