Sewing Machine Has A Tummy-Ache...And Not Liking Lift's.

Now my sewing machine is poorly...I can usually fix it myself with those dear little screwdrivers that come with them. Have a bit of a poke and a prod and there it is mended. Not this time though...as luck would have it, one of the ladies who works in the craft shop in Sligo, also mends and services sewing machines...so I'll take it there when we go to the hospital on Tuesday...

You'll have noticed how a visit to the out-patients and doing battle with Lemon Face always coincides with a visit to the craft shop...it's up some stairs, because downstairs on the ground floor there are pets for sale...rabbits and guinea-pigs and white mice...budgies and canaries and snakes...and tank after tank of gorgeous tropical fish.

There's paint as well and lawn-mowers and garden chairs and peanuts for birds...

I haven't used the lift yet...such a baby over going in lifts you know...I'll never go in one on my own...no way. I'd stand there all the day long waiting for a person rather than do that...

There was a truly horrible lift at Aston University...it was a sort of endlessly moving thing with little compartments you had to leap into and then jump out when you reached the floor you needed. Gave me the feckin' willies so it did...I'd plod up the stairs instead and take forever to reach floor five where my boyfriend would be bent over his books...

Can't be doing with the lifts at the hospital either...huge spaces crammed full of people in wheelchairs and earnest young Doctors with stethoscopes round their necks...arms full of patients files, all the papers bulging out...they sigh and look anxiously at wristwatches. Didn't mind too much if there was a porter in charge of my wheelchair...they crack jokes and tease the nurses and sort of lighten the mood and stop me thinking of the entire she-bang plummeting to the floor... with us ending up squelched.

I've seen nasty lifts in films...those glass boxes that go up and down outside skyscrapers...I'd wet myself if anyone said that was the only way up...or down.

In the meantime, Himself found my old sewing machine which has a foot pedal and sounds like a traction engine in full spate and either goes extremely fast or not at all...