Greetings from Las Vegas. As I write this it is 7AM, or as my body calls it – what the hell time is it now? Wonderwife and I are here for a week and then off to Florida for a writer’s conference and actually bit of a holiday holiday at the end. This week is research for a project that is all very hush hush – although the sharper amongst you might guess what it is. We ended up doing this trip after moving house a few days beforehand, which to be fair was a terrible idea, but – to be fair to us, it wasn’t ours. Our plan was to move house in July/August – but holy hopscotch batman that takes a long time! So, we got on the plane on sunday morning exhausted and in need not so much of a break as a few days break before a break. Still, ye gotta roll with it baby. We got here Sunday, watched some football and then went for a nap which nobody woke up from for six hours. In short, we totally balls up the whole ‘stay awake and get in synch’ plan for jetlag on an 8 hour difference. This is why at 7AM I’m blogging and Wonderwife is down in the gym jogging. She is feeling the burn but luckily, I’ve got my own burn on the go.
Last week, I’d a sore shoulder and went and got some physiotherapy. This did not go well. I ended up coming out with a stabbing pain in my upper back when I walked that I didn’t have on the way in. Moving house shockingly doesn’t seem to have improved that so basically, I got here and I needed to find a physiotherapist to fix me as otherwise, I was going to be very limited in what I can do. Also, not being able to walk far in a country where the portion sizes are so out of control, there’s a very good chance I’d need to be stuck on the plane back home as freight. So, we set out to find a physiotherapist. Fun fact: We had to do the same thing in Japan when we went there on the first day of our holiday there a couple of years ago. This is becoming a fairly crappy tradition. We did what anyone would and had a Google. What we found was a sports masseuse who had very good reviews on the internet – and really, as we all know, the internet is 100% reliable. I mean, if you can’t trust ‘anybody with access to a keyboard’ who can you trust?
So, we booked in an appointment and we ended up at a strip mall outside of Vegas. It seemed to consist of churches, pawn shops, a tattoo parlour and a beauty parlour. After some investigation, we realised our sport’s masseuse was located in a room at the back of the beauty parlour. Now – I consider myself a not judgemental person but a teeny tiny bit of me was concerned that let’s call him ‘Fred’ aka the dude who was going to fix me, walked with a pronounced limp. That was entirely unfair of me, after all there could be loads of good reasons for that. Still, like a bald barber or a mechanic who arrives at your house in an Uber, it isn’t the greatest first impression. Still, Fred seemed pleasant enough in a slightly spaced out sort of a way. He showed me into his ‘clinic’ which was pretty obviously a converted storeroom. He left me alone to get comfortable. I noticed that where my physiotherapist in Manchester had certificates and what-not framed on his wall, Fred had a painting of a moose. An angry looking, possibly constipated moose. I’m not a religious man but I did look to the heavens and offer a quick prayer this would be alright. That’s when I noticed that a large hole in the ceiling was filled with a duvet. I would have run, but I was barely able to walk. Fred came back in and I laid down.
1 minute in: Fred dims the light and puts on a CD of sitar music. This did not relax me. In my experience, medical professional don’t try to ‘set the mood’. Fred, while maintaining his hippyish vibe, then proceeded to start inflicting pain on me while telling me how much pain he’d inflicted on other people. He tells me he did work on the guys who were in Vegas for the Rugby Sevens tournament. i think this was his way of giving me a bit of his CV to relax me. It had the opposite effect. As you may’ve picked up – I love rugby. Massive fan. I also was lucky enough to spend 14 seasons on the sideline at London Irish doing the announcements. The biggest thing I can tell you about rugby players is they’re generally very polite, charming and intelligent lads but they’re also not members of the same species as me. These are supposed human beings who regularly have to be told that they are bleeding and who then get annoyed when they get directed to leave the field so someone can deal with the whole bleeding thing. They seem to have very little grasp on the concept of pain. I, on the other hand, not to brag – do. For example, I can tell you that what Fred is doing to me is all kinds of pain.
10 minutes in: I try to make small talk in an effort to get Fred to like me in the hope he might go easier than the pummeling I am currently taking. I ask him how long he’s lived in Vegas. Turns out he’s been there for a while, having gone looking for a fresh start after a divorce. So, I’ve brought up memories of what is probably the darkest time in his life and the woman who left him and kept the house. The small talk thing is going great. Pain level: 9 out of 10
20 minutes in: Fred is now trying to make small talk. For some reason, the royal family keeps coming up. Despite the agony, some idiot Irish part of my brain decides to correct him that they’re not my royal family as I’m Irish. The rest of my brain looks at the idiot patriot like he’s walked into Grandma’s funeral with the family jewels hanging out. Pain level: 10 out of 10
30-35 minutes in: Like a Russian novel, life is pain. I’ve given up trying to suppress my yelps and groans of agony in the hope Fred will go easier. Fred is a stone cold psycho who doesn’t seem to notice. My head is stuck in that hole in the table thing so I risk a glance at my watch to see exactly how much time is left. I reckon we’re on the home stretch by now. It’s an hour appointment, and the worst is probably over. It is then I discover that I have so far been on the table for the grand total of nine minutes! NINE! How is this possible? Pain level: 4500 out of 10
10-60 minutes in: Pain. More pain. So much pain. And small talk. Some of the most stilted small talk you’ve heard in your life. Pain Level: Numbers do not exist to accurately quantify it.
When we’re done, I pay up and meet Wonderwife in reception. She used this time to get her nails done and she’d a lovely chat with the nice lady. She asks if the pain in my back has gone – honestly, it is hard to tell. It’s like trying to figure out if the tap in the kitchen is still leaking when a tsunami has passed through the house. Still, we go for a bit of a walk as there is a Red Lobster a couple of blocks away and Elaine wants to try it as she’s never been. We quickly realise that we are the only people walking in the area who don’t have all their belongings in a shopping cart. It seems Vegas like LA is very much a car town. We have some reasonable seafood while listening to a table of octogenarians discussing the Hustlers film starring Jennifer Lopez. Their discussion of pole dancing is really quite something. One of them wants a go, one of them wonders how slippy the pole is, another thinks they must get dizzy. Still, it’d be a great workout. If these ladies really want a workout, they should go see Fred.
So, dear reader – here I am the next morning after a rough night’s sleep as the only people to take as bad a beating as me in the last couple of weeks is the Miami Dolphins. For the 98% of you who don’t get that reference, I’m sore all over. In places I wasn’t sore before. In places I didn’t know I had places before. Still, when Wonderwife gets back from the gym, we’re heading out for a walk at which point we’ll figure out if Fred fixed me or I just paid a dude $70 to kick the crap out of me in a storeroom of a beauty parlour with a hole in the roof while a constipated moose looked on. Fingers crossed!