Therapeutic discomfort

J the plumber failed to furnish me with work this week. There's lots on but somehow it didn't come together. Secretly, I was delighted... I had a miserable time last week wrestling with radiators that kept falling off walls, and the week before I had to listen to a large man shouting at his small children all day while I was trying to screw things into their soggy plasterboard. No one said it would be easy, and they weren't wrong.

Yesterday I stayed in bed all morning reading The Devil And Miss Prym (verdict: deep if you're ten years old), then (mostly) caught up on my paperwork. In the evening I attended a delightfully stuffy meeting of our Residents' Association Committee, as round-the-corner-S and I have decided to stop editing the local newsletter and wanted to tell them why. The wine was posh and I believe I banged the table a couple of times. We giggled all the way back down the hill.

Today was altogether more serious. I went to see a young man called Humphrey, who stuck his thumbs in my glutea maxima (sp?). It was astonishingly painful. There's lots of tension here Jo, he said, focus on that breathing for me. OK, I said, uncurling my toes and trying not to bite through my lip. I've never been massaged (professionally) by a man before, there's a lot to be said for it, if you can get past the embarrassment. They are stronger and have bigger hands. You know you've been seen to, put it that way.

No one's ever done that to my lower back before, I said afterwards, perching gingerly on a little folding chair and feeling floaty. I'm sure it's done wonders, but it really bloody hurt. Well, he said, it might help not to think of it as pain. We prefer to think of it as therapeutic discomfort. You have to go towards it rather than away from it if you're going to open things up.

Maybe he's right. I feel like I've been butterflied.

joella