After spending more than a year crawling around the house, holding onto furniture and doors, shopping online and endlessly reading about Brexit, I decided it was madness to be wearing hill-walking gear and began to buy ankle length skirts instead. I went for black because I love black and I felt gloomy and saw myself as one of those old Greek or Russian peasant women hobbling around on a stick. Granted I was using bright pink elbow crutches with red mules and hadn't got round to a headscarf but you get the picture. I've always seen clothes as a bit of fancy dress and spent the 1970's in flares, long dresses and straw hats wreathed in flowers. So here I was comfort buying and trying on different versions of me now I mostly lay on the sofa with my ipad.
Last November I had a hip replacement and for six weeks became a different person because the hospital told me to. I wore joggers and slippers that hadn't seen the light of day since I'd had my ropey knee replacement seven years earlier. I appliqued fish on them to cover up a hole in the toe and they were greatly admired. But none of that was me.
Three months later at eighty I'm still working on who I am. The red mules are a fixture. I've even bought a pair of red winter boots. Classy but waterproof. My previous boots were hill walking ones. A rather posh quilted coat has been added to all my Gortex. It won't do for standing around with a tripod waiting for the light to change while getting rained on by passing showers though.
I haven't been up a hill for nine years but my wardrobe and I transferred perfectly to photography. Then photography got limited to the garden and eventually not even that. Now things are changing again. So who am I going to be ?
My new hip is wonderful. Totally pain free. But there's the knee. It's better but still pretty painful. I do exercises. I walk every day. At present by the time I go to bed I've covered half a kilometre which is much further than when I started. And the distance is going up a few steps every couple of days. It's hard to tell what the pain is doing but it's not getting worse. The pink crutch has gone and a red stick has been added to my wardrobe. Light, elegant and I probably don't need it. But I couldn't resist. Yesterday I walked up and down Falkland High Street without it. My consultant thinks my knee may eventually be pain free but that's a dream at the moment.
In June I'm going to Northumberland to photograph. I'll be taking babushka skirts and hill-walking trousers. Red mules and Merril walking shoes. My posh coat will be left behind but I have a black Paramo waterproof fleece which looks like velvet and is classy in its own way. And my red stick will come too mainly because I love it . But I hope to go up a hill. A very small one where there's rather a nice stone circle. My stick, elegant as it is, may very well come in handy if I do.