Free You Have Not a Leg to Stand On by D.D. Mayers

around delicious food, served with such grace and warmth, was quickly replaced, by another carafe. All too soon we’d come to the end of our lovely evening, so I called for the bill. While taking out the money from my bumbag, I glanced down at the very pretty tiled floor. Oddly, underneath the table and all around us, was a great pool of clear, pale yellow water with a strangely reminiscent odour. I said to my wife, ‘I wonder where on earth all this water...’ I didn’t finish the question, we just looked at each other and froze. Simultaneously, we knew. Oh God! I slammed down a wad of money, and we fled. We didn’t stop fleeing for five minutes. Crashing up and down curbs, racing across streets without looking either way, until we were both sagging from lack of breath. If they’d cared to follow, we wouldn’t have been hard to find. A trail of slightly pungent liquid which was now beginning to form another pool led directly to the open tap of the bag on my left leg. I hope to goodness, the wad of money slammed on the table, adequately compensated for the awfulness I’d left behind, and I can now only apologise profusely.
    A taxi deposited us at the collection point. It wasn’t long before a deep, dense brown, bright new, gleaming, Mercedes 300 D, purred into view and stopped directly in front of us. Suddenly, there it was, majestically awaiting its owners. The driver, with an air of bored nonchalance quickly showed us about the car, as though it were something people did every day. He was right, of course, not only did people do it every day, as far as he was concerned, they did it every hour of every day. As he threw us the keys while walking away, he said over his shoulder, ‘And read the manual before you leave.’ Read the manual before you leave, it takes two years to read a manual.
    We were alone with our beautiful new car. I slowly wheeled around it just looking at it. Odd, when you come to think of it, an inanimate lump of metal, but for most of us, buying a new car, is one of the major investments of our lifetime. We opened our doors with the softest, almost soundless of pulls, and slowly climbed in. The indescribable smell of new leather upholstery is, well, indescribable, it’s like no other, it is simply ‘plush’. It wasn’t for another forty years, when our Dear Uncle Peter, five years before he died, said, ‘I’d like you to have the pleasure of smelling the interior of a brand-new car again,’ So he bought us a sparkling new VW Passat estate with beige leather upholstery and a walnut dashboard. We sat together in the new car, inhaled, then laughed out loud. There wasn’t any point in explaining the joke to the mystified salesman. An expensive joke!
    Sitting behind the wheel of this glorious new car produced the same reaction as it did, all those years later with Uncle Peter in the sparkling Passat. We looked at each other and laughed out loud. The pleasure of driving in this faultlessly designed machine, lasted for seventeen, totally trouble free years, covering more than two hundred and fifty thousand miles.
    One of the many banes of a paraplegic’s life is how to prevent a pressure sore forming, on your bum, from sitting too long in one position. We’d been taught to raise ourselves, by pushing down on the chair’s arm-pads, once every ten minutes, and to stay raised for ten seconds. That’s all very well in theory, but in practice, it’s not really feasible.
    In those days, cushions weren’t designed as they are today. Then, what was thought to be the best, was thick sheepskin over a softish piece of foam. Sounds ideal, so that’s what I had. However, if you don’t do your lifting, you’ll more than likely get a red patch at the end of the sacral bone, in the middle of each skeletal bum cheek. If a red patch isn’t immediately acted upon, by not sitting on it, it could take up to six months of