Ow

Emerging earlier today from the shopper’s paradise that is Boots, I took off my backpack to shove some stuff into it. It slipped in my hand, and I instinctively grabbed. Ow, I thought.

My right thumbnail had gouged into the cuticle-area skin of the third finger on my left hand, leaving a pink, fleshy area roughly the shape and size of Belgium. Ow, I thought again.

I bled my way into Superdrug to buy some plasters. (I’d just got out of a long queue in Boots.) The girl on the till helpfully sniggered as I handed over a crisp new fiver with bloody hands.

Thence to Borders, where I bled my way to Starbucks to obtain today’s magic toilet code (4321, fact fans), and tried not to stain the toilet door as I keyed it in. (They’ve had vandalism problems, so they lock the doors now. They’ll happily give the code to any T, D or H though.)

After washing off the blood and wrapping some toilet paper temporarily around Belgium, I used my remaining fingers to try to find my way into the plastic-wrapped plasters. “Simply peel back”, it claimed, giving no indication of where you peel back from. I eventually located a millimetre overlap and forced my way into the packaging.

Suitably plastered I then let an OAP into the gents, who’d been scrabbling away at the door unable to figure out how to get in. We agreed it was a stupid system.