My right foot

Some of the happiest moments of my life have been spent balancing precariously on slippery rocks in various parts of Sydney and the surrounding countryside.

We would stand there, poised at the ocean's edge, watching the approaching swells, waiting for one that would take us clear of the rocks. When one arrived, we would plunge into the cool, clear water without hesitation, dive six or seven metres to the ocean floor, stare up at the sunlight playing on the surface and then float gently towards it as the air in our lungs came close to depletion. We would burst through the surface, smiling and laughing and gasping for air.

That was the theory anyway. It turns out that hesitating is something that it's very easy to do when you're contemplating diving head first into cold water, especially if the reason you're diving into cold water in the first place is to temporarily alleviate the symptoms of a hangover. Under these circumstances, hesitating is a pretty bad idea. If a big swell catches you when you're not ready for it, you run the risk of losing your footing and being dragged across the coral encrusted rock, which is not a nice thing to happen to anyone.

Fortunately, this only happened to me once, and I only have one small scar to commemorate the incident. However, in Sydney, my feet, in association with rocks, did eventually become synonymous with bloodshed.

Over the course of most weekends we'd end up jumping off North Bondi Rocks into the sea at least half a dozen times. These were most enjoyable excursions as they were usually preceded by a right old knees up on the previous evening, and often directly followed by a pie or a Bondi Burger, which you may or may not know is the best chicken burger in the world.

Upon exiting the water, however, and with alarming regularity, I would hear someone say, "Ollie, you're bleeding!"
On these occasions I would look down and, sure enough, discover that some part of one or another of my feet was gushing blood. Having become an outdoor type over the last couple of years, this situation was never met with panic on my part. Usually I would shrug and gaze intensely off toward the horizon. Then someone else would say, "No, Ollie, you really are bleeding!" and I would look down again, realise I was stood in a puddle of my own blood and decide that I should probably go off and seek medical attention.

So frequent were these occurences that it got to the point when Saturday night would come around, we'd be sat in the pub and someone would say, "Ollie, did you bleed today?"
If I did not answer in the affirmative it would invariably prompt the response, "Hmm, something to look forward to tomorrow then, eh?"

In fact, the only time I made it through the weekend without bleeding on the rocks, I went home and trod on a small twig in my kitchen while I was cooking dinner. The twig, of course, pierced my skin and thus provoked the obligatory weekly outpouring of blood.

Some people say that I'm accident prone. I disagree. I just think that my feet are a magnet for sharp rocks. Particularly my right foot, it turns out.

While diving and snorkelling on Koh Tao, my right foot sustained various minor injuries from rocks, but it wasn't until I arrived in India that the strange magnetic effect of my right foot really became apparent. The day I arrived in Bombay I was pushing my bag around the airport in a state of barely contained panic, when I kicked the luggage trolley - not once, but twice - resulting in unpleasant gashes on my little toe and the one next to it. "F*cking typical," I thought as I collapsed on a bench and contemplated bursting into tears.

I spent the next two weeks on Palolem Beach battling to keep my wounded toes clean in order to prevent the nasty tropical germs from getting in - not an easy task, let me tell you. After all, Palolem Beach is... well, a beach. There's f*cking sand everywhere. Not only that, I discovered that my right foot is actually a magnet for heavy objects of all kinds. Therefore, at least three times a day I would somehow manage to catch my increasingly mangled little toe on various objects, including rocks buried in the f*cking sand, but more often on the corner of one of the planks of wood roped shakily together to form my coco hut.

On such occasions I would dive onto my bed and thump the matress as hard as I could in a fit of agony-induced rage while a torrent of awful, awful language would spill from lips, interspersed with the words, "Why, God, why?!"

Recently, the magnetic properties of my right foot have been less pronounced, causing me to consider the possibility that the problem was psychological in nature. In the case of my poor little toe, I became obsessed with keeping it clean and therefore it somehow perversely began to entice calamity. Either that, or this is compelling evidence for the existence of a God with a sense of humour.

Five weeks later and my toe is only just recovering. There's a patch of healthy pink flesh where previously there was a puss-filled sore. As you can imagine, I've been looking forward to this moment, imagining myself gambolling gaily down the Keralan beaches without a care in the world, taking a quick dip in the ocean without fear of opening up the carefully crafted infection-free scab that it took weeks to engineer.

That wouldn't be too much to ask, would it?

Yes, it would. The very same day I was able to caress my little toe and say to it, "Thou art healed, my child," I somehow managed to scratch open a mosquito bite on my lower right leg and promptly get it infected. I'm guessing that it will take about five weeks to heal, which will put me somewhere in the Himalayas when it does. So, I'm really looking forward to my right foot slipping on a patch of snow, losing my balance and falling down a mountain.

Either I am a masochist in denial or it would seem that God really does have a sense of humour.