dignity fail.

Amiens has a craft market on the Rue Trois Caillons on Saturdays. Among other things on my way to meet friends for the start of an evening's excesses at Au Bureau, I saw lace, sculpture and paintings. My advice to anyone who intends to take in the crafty sights while they're wandering the town, is to watch where they're walking - I cannot stress this enough - as failure to pay attention to the proximity of the kerb may result in a hilarious but dignity-shattering tumble. After gabbling out the appropriate French for the occassion to concerned passers-by ("C'est pas grave..") I managed to hobble the rest of the way to the Hotel de Ville, but after sitting down at the café for 30 minutes I found that my knees had swollen to somewhat epic proportions and I couldn't get up without extreme difficulty: the left one with a lovely swollen nub of bone below the kneecap, and the right extremely tender on the inside of the knee. Two differing kinds of injury make for an extremely interesting limp; as the evening progressed, I had to resort to being piggybacked up stairs, and helped between pubs.

Sunday was a different kind of suffering entirely. At least I can say for alcohol that it's a very effective painkiller - but the day after might include a very sore head as well as knees.

Mostly I'm just very impressed that my tights didn't rip, and glad that I don't wear high heels.