How long does it take a 67-year-old to realise she’s not 27 any more? Never, if the number of accidents and falls I have had in the past couple of years is anything to go by. I went 12 years in New York without so much as a scratch, yet in the UK and Europe, danger seems to lurk on every street corner.
Owing to my right eye being largely dysfunctional and awaiting an operation, my spatial awareness is extremely limited. In Penarth, where the streets are dark and the pavements badly maintained, I had my worst falls, including one spiralling down a dozen steps because the landlord had not heeded residents’ warnings about inadequate lighting and a largely out-of-order lift.
Six weeks ago, in Spain for a wedding, I fell up the single step in the Airbnb I was staying in. It had been marked with a yellow and black striped warning sticker, but only on the horizontal edge. Who knows whether I would still have fallen had the vertical edge also been marked, thereby making it clearer there was a right angle, but while my eyes were so focused on the zigzags, my brain didn’t send the warning message to my feet. I just saw fuzzy shapes and, in my disorientation, my left foot tripped on the concrete step that might as well have fallen on to it, for all the agony I was in.
