Bathtime.

I'm not very sanitary. I try to avoid to washing too much. I figure, if you're only going to get dirty again, why bother? I'm inconsistent in this, of course, because I nonetheless love the feeling of having washed. But prospectively, time spent washing looks like dead time. The only way to entice myself to wash is to combine it with a nap - ie, to have a bath.

So. I was sitting on my bed on Friday night, when her injunction to wash revisited me. What better way, I asked myself, to unwind on a Friday night than to bathe. And so it was that I was set. I leapt up onto my feet, and then launched myself off it, the better to hurry to the bathroom. Frivolity really does characterise everything I do. I

don't know how much you know about radiators - possibly some, but not everything there is to know. If you cast your mind back to the last time you really looked at one, you'll recall that along the top of the radiator there are two parallel metal ridges, the better to increase surface area and heat dispersion. These ridges are generally smoothed down at either end. In my room, beside the end of my bed and under my window, there is a small, foot-high radiator concealed by a curtain.

It was onto this that I unknowingly threw my left foot, such that my second and third toes went either side of the back ridge corner, even through the curtain. I yelped and lay on the floor shouting a lot in pain, trying to gauge just how painful this was. After a few minutes I crawled into the bathroom and put my left foot in the bath, and turned the shower on it on cold. It hurt like almighty fuck. I wailed; a lot. Clearly, the bath was right out. Bollocks. God only knew when I'd next feel like scrubbing myself.

I found a clean damp flannel and pressed it to my foot quite hard. I went back to my computer and fucked about online for a while; took a painkiller. Waited for the pain to abate, about which it was being rather coy. I had yet to look at it, because I knew that looking at it would only upset me. By now, a good ten minutes had passed. So I turned over my left foot and had a poke, only to see the bone of my third toe rather clearly exposed and the flesh neatly sliced, very deeply.

I called an ambulance, and then I called her (she counselled me to wrap up warm, get a book, and my wallet, and my passport - all sound moves) and then hobbled out in slippers to meet the ambulance, in which I went into shock, lost lots of blood, narrowly avoided vomiting, left scare-mongering voicemails on my flatmate's phone apologising for the blood on the floor, and so on. I kept trying to persuade the ambulance people not to look after me because I didn't want to be a bother.

I got to the hospital at about midnight and was admitted, amidst much garrulous blood-humour, to A&E minors. I was seen in about 25 minutes by a tall, slender and elegant doctor called XXX XXX. I can't quite place her ethnicity - perhaps half Malay? She spoke very, very softly, and with a tiny inflection of foreignness in her otherwise unplaceably middle-class accent. She moved as though through fluid. I thought what a good think it was that I was looking so good that night in my grey woollen trousers, &c &c. I may have been delirious.

She stitched me up (four) and her fingers on my feet and ankles were disconcertingly sensual. She spoke so softly that my injury became an agent of collusion - we, co-conspirators, fighting for the eroticisation of standard local-anaesthetic operations. In the taxi home, I thought I should write her a letter to thank her for making my evening. I may have been delirious.

Hot chocolate and whiskey. On the phone to her for a while, full of cocodamol. A very deep sleep indeed.