Decades, dates, David Bowie and me

There's been a lot of coverage to commemorate ten years (yesterday, 10 January) since the death of David Bowie, and the concurrent release of his final LP Blackstar (on 8 January, his 69th birthday). And rightly so: it's a great album; he was a talented multifaceted artist. I'll admit, it took me a while to accept him into my early listening life after taking strongly against much of his 80s output (let's not talk about collabs such as Under Pressure or Dancing In The Street), but luckily that was eventually rectified and I'm as big a fan as any of Space Oddity and Life On Mars and even songs unrelated to any celestial set-ups. 

But I don't usually blether on here about such things as who and who I don't lean towards musically – and there's a reason why I'm doing it now: in order to open up a tiny crack and shed a little light into my world beyond reading and writing. Four weeks ago tomorrow, I had my right hip removed and replaced with a foreign body that it is claimed will make my life better. In the month since the hip op hippety op don't stop the boogie, I'll not lie, my life has been a very long way from better. Who knew pain like this could exist, and also how many types of pain there are? 

We won't dwell on this, nor on the absolute inconvenience of not being able to do the most mundane things like putting on socks, nor the realisation that dropping things on the floor is actually more commonplace than house sparrows or terrible second series you've waited so long for, in vain, the unforeseen inability to take in any written words beyond a couple of teeny Insta posts and one easyread article in Vogue (about Chanel here across the Channel; they assumed the punning half-rhyme was enough to hook a feature on), the downright discombobulation at the concreteness of two steps forward and one step back. (Pic is of me on one of my last trips out before the procedure, a sunny winter's day on Castlefield Viaduct.)

Anyway, the op was a week before my birthday, which is two days before Christmas, so at least I'd stocked up on nice biscuits and booze-tinged truffles from the Aldi middle aisle before checking into the hozzy (Trafford General, birthplace of the fabulous NHS). Small wins. Since you ask, I turned 54, like the famous New-Yorkaise studio where David Bowie was a regular. Ah, yes, so the Bowie thing. Well, ten years ago, on Saturday 9 January 2016, I was in a cab with Blackstar playing over the tinny speakers and the driver pretending not to be in panic mode as he drove an inflating me a short distance to Manchester Royal Infirmary where I was superspeedtriaged and rushed through to A&E and pumped full of antihistamines and steroids and dragged back from the edge of anaphylaxis and all the rest of it. 

Exciting stuff, but what has this to do with total hip replacements? OK, just before the festive season of 2015, I'd been shown the results of an X-ray, having presented at my GP – not for the first time – with shocking pain in my right hip. As with the previous presenting occasions (one of which was during a period involving me having to make my way up and down the stairs of my house in Chorlton – so we're going back a long time here – on my bum), the X-ray showed significant-but-not-significant-enough erosion of my old bones thanks to arthritis (thanks, Arthritis). The doctor was very sympathetic and advised ibuprofen as ideal for next time I found myself in discomfort or anticipating being on my feet all day or undertaking other such physical jerks. The morning of Saturday 9 January 2016, David and I were sitting in our flat's kitchen, planning a trip out to recce possible places for moving to while eating breakfast (boiled eggs and soldiers, orange juice and coffee, since you ask – plus, of course, the magical antiflammatory I'd been advised). 

Five minutes or so later, I was saying I didn't feel so good and was having a little lie-down, with Pushkin Cat lying on top of me purring while David Googled "anaphylactic shock". It was Leap Year. On 29 February 2016, I asked David to marry me; this one's a keeper, I thought. Later that year, we moved, on Brexit vote day. We'll have been here ten years this summer. We tied the knot up the road from here on Saturday 29 February 2020 and had our honeymoon in a springtime Paris, making it out on the final Eurostar before France went into confinement, and the UK announced lockdown effective 26 March. There's always a date-related story, isn't there?