Pains

Throughout Ramadhan I was worried that I wouldn't be able to attend the mosque for prayers when Eid arrived due to problems with my left knee. Just before fasting month I found myself unable to bend said knee properly. The problem righted itself, but reappeared on two occasions in the course of the month. It is actually possible to do prayers in congregation even if you can't perform all the movements. Doing them seated is perfectly acceptable - but I'm ignobly self-conscious about this and concerned that people will assume I just don't know what I'm doing and my dreadful Malay just isn't up to explanations. Also there's no particular reason why it should have been so important to me to attend the mosque for prayers yesterday. It just was. And somehow I coped, even though my knee was indicating it was not entirely happy with proceedings in the last sequence of the prayers. In fact, I used a chair at home for the three remaining sets of prayers of the day.

This is all by way of prelude to a bit of a catastrophe today. This morning I managed to wrench my back reaching for a t-shirt in a bag. The result is that I'm now moving with all the grace of a ninety-year-old with pain, or rather extreme discomfort, as a constant companion, except when I'm lying flat on the floor, which is often. Ah, the irony of it all.

I'm also finding myself in the grip of another form of extreme discomfort. Part of my post-Ramadhan reading has been in the form of J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. As usual Coetzee's writing is taking me to places I'd rather not go, but making it impossible for me to avoid them.

The dark places are real and must be dealt with.