This is my first post via an iPad! I’m on holiday in France at the moment, it’s fabulously sunny and warm. I’m having a very relaxing time spending my days reading or pottering around wonderful French Market towns. At about 6pm we start having a couple of beers and wines then settle into the balmy evening chatting and just being in France.

Near the little terrace we sit at is a large fig tree. It has a huge crop of over ripe figs on it and these are nectar for hornets. I don’t mind hornets so much, when they are gorging with fig they are very dozy and are just getting on with their lives and leaving me alone to enjoy my beer and wine in the French sun.

If you are a follower of my blog you will know I spent quite a bit of time working on the fence lines with my late Father. I haven’t mentioned in my blog posts though that one day I was doing some battening. Battening is when you attach wooden stakes at regular intervals to the fence wire to make it more impregnable. This is done with staples which you drive into the wood with a hammer, it’s very tedious. So to relieve the tedium Dad bought a pneumatic staple gun. This a very powerful bit of kit you can shoot a staple a very long way with when you are playing with it rather than working.

One day while battening with the gun, I lost my footing and put my hand down by instinct to steady myself. Unfortunately it was the staple gun wielding hand and in a nutshell I shot a staple into my booted foot. The staple went right through my big toe and stapled my foot to the sole of my boot. Imagine just for a moment what that feels like. Ok that’s enough. I’m alone on a mountain with no help for miles so I had to use my fencing pliers to extract the staple from my boot and toe. That hurt far more than it going in! This experience was by some margin the most painful of my life.
Until yesterday.

So we are back in France in the evening and after another thoroughly splendid meal and drinks, we are getting ready to retire (a little merry).

After the usual ablutions I pop to the kitchen to get some water. Unbeknown to me and for reasons known only to itself there was a Hornet on the floor in the kitchen. I stood on it, in the dark. Let me tell you what a Hornet sting feels like. Imagine getting injected with fire while being simultaneously smashed in the same spot with a large hammer. It was as though a red hot poker had been inserted into my foot. It was astonishingly and completely sobering. I have never so wished for the immediate return of drink filled numbness.

I just sat on the floor filling the night air with many and varied expletives and pleaded for vinegar, as you do. I got up and hopped to bed to lie there with my foot on a cushion apparently being poked by demons, with fiery daggers. My wife, Jenny fired up the iPad and scanned cures for Hornet stings, it seemed death was most preferred option by those inflicted with the agony. I could relate to that.

It was a long, horrendously painful night, the combination of stinging agony and throbbing pain, all night, and here at midday the following day the pain has subsided to a dull roar. so there you have it, if you crave immediate sobriety, get yourself stung by a Hornet! Me though, I shall have an extra beer and extra wine tonight to dull the pain. I prefer inebriation to agony.