This week I fell down the stairs. My mind was preoccupied with the roast dinner I was cooking and I was making my way past an avalanche of LEGO which had been thoughtfully abandoned on the stairs and I slipped. Ha ha very funny. Shut up.

For most people their natural reaction would be to soil themselves, mutter a swear word and then crack on that was exactly the way they wanted to come down the stairs, quickly, on their arse and screaming expletives.

Not so much for me. I fear the slip, trip and fall because of my precarious back and the worry that a bump might mean I end up in great pain, and at the mercy of a surgeon.

So I did my dramatic tumble down the stairs and took to social media to grumble about it. I cited injured pride as the worst that had happened (thankfully), but I’m watching a corker of a bruise develop on my left arm, I have a dodgy knee, a twangy groin and my right arm doesn’t like moving, twisting or picking things up. I’m bumped and bashed but I’ll live.

So why the blog post? Well dear reader, I’m pretty fed up with people who have known me for years, or followed me and interacted with me on social media saying stupid things like “haha did you get drunk and fall down the stairs again?”. Well no. Shut up.

Firstly I’ve never fallen down the stairs drunk in my life. I know better than that, when drunk the safest way to traverse the stairs is by crawling up or down them. You can take that advice and use it, feel free to pass it on. I am not and never have been a falling down drunk. I can count on the fingers of half of one hand how many times I’ve had a drunken fall in 25 years of expert drinking. I have a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long (drinking) career. The ability to stay upright and get home in one piece are high on that list.

Secondly if you knew anything about me, you’d know I have nerve damage from the waist down. Some days I don’t have real feet, I wake up with bath sponges on the bottom of my legs (I just can’t feel them, it’s a strange sensation), the feeling in my thighs is long gone and my calves are hit and miss. Stairs are always something I need to concentrate on, but today I was thinking about bread sauce and went arse over elbow. My fault, my fault and that damn LEGO left abandoned and unloved.

I’m moaning because I’ve had a bit of a sense of humour failure. Or maybe people aren’t funny. The “haha did you get drunk again” people are the same people who say stupid things like “cheer up love it might never happen”. They think they’re helping, but their silence would be more helpful. Them backing away and never entering your breathing space again would be pretty magical too.

I guess I’m one of those people with a hidden disability, I look, act and walk (for the most part) in a perfectly normal way, so it’s easy to assume I’m just clumsy or a shambling alcoholic, but I’m not. So kindly keep your *hilarious* suggestions that I’m a bumbling alcoholic to yourself. I’m lucky to have legs that work as well as they do, I try and be good humoured and upbeat about my lot in life, so I hope you’ll forgive me the odd sense of humour bypass and you’ll find a way to shut the hell up. Capisce.