my right leg

My right leg is starting to look much less battered than it was.  I'd managed to pick up a long scrape on my shin, and a large bruise just above the knee, but the bruise has faded and the scrape is almost healed, give or take the flaky edges.  I picked up the scrape walking into a log while carrying a bale of sawdust.  The log lives outside the pot shed, and has done so for years.  I am not utterly sure why, except that it is very heavy and that may be where it ended up after it had proved impossible to split for firewood.  It has the stubby remains of a branch coming from it, which may be why it wouldn't split, and was the thing I walked into.  We should probably move it before either of us does it again.  My leg was quite sore for several days, and when I surveyed the damage I thought I had better learn not to do that sort of thing, before I become an old lady and my flesh no longer heals.  Damage to the shins is notoriously tricky in old people.

The large bruise was a complete mystery.  I never felt anything at the time.  Indeed, I don't even know when the time was, but merely discovered a startling striated purple patch when I saw myself in the mirror after taking a shower.  From the height of the damage I suspect that the edge of the wheelbarrow may have had a role in the accident.  The bruise went from purple to greenish yellow, as bruises do, before fading as if it had never been.  It's just a pity that I have collected another, smaller bruise higher up on the other leg.  I don't know where that one came from either.

I am amazed at the amount of angst that the question of shaving or not shaving their legs arouses in the breasts of female columnists, but perhaps it is only synthetic angst, because they have to write about something, and having an opinion on shaving is easier than going out and investigating something or interviewing somebody.  But why doesn't the question of whether or not men should shave their faces receive equal column inches and agony?  Men who want to grow beards, or can't be bothered to shave, grow beards.  Other men shave.  Occasionally a journalist gets a short piece out of the question of whether we have reached peak beard, and nobody takes any notice of the conclusion, or at least the Systems Administrator still has one, and Guy Garvey had the last time I saw him on TV.  Same for legs, ladies.  If the sight of your hairy legs under your floral summer dress upsets you then shave them, or wear trousers, it's up to you.  If you don't mind, or can't be bothered, or believe that body hair is a feminist issue, then don't shave.  Nobody else minds that much.

Addendum  The younger generations may think in metres and litres, but the language remains resolutely Imperial.  Nobody ever ran a kilometre at the prospect of something they didn't like, or devoted column centimetres to it.