Giving the finger

I love those jigsaws Fuzzy and Bev are posting of pictures of Vincent. Sadly, this new laptop has a few refinements that make it very difficult to navigate my way round them. The mousepad is one-piece, and it's very easy for the finger to slip across on to the main part of the pad, and you end up all over the place. Grabbing and moving the jigsaw pieces (and the cards in Solitaire) is a major challenge. I expect I'll get used to it in the end, but for now it's very frustrating.

You can also change the magnification of the screen display by some means known only to the designer, and as I haven't yet grasped this, I find that I'm enlarging or reducing a page completely inadvertently.

Of course, all this is not helped by the fact that, about 12 years ago, I severed the digital orbital nerve in my right index finger. That's the business finger for laptop mousepads. The outer edge of the finger has limited feeling (imagine a sticking plaster on your finger, and the reduced sensation you have in that finger when you touch it with another finger, and you get an idea of how my finger operates) and will probably never regain full sensation.

The operation to reattach the nerve was interesting. My hand wasn't quite numb when the surgeon started, so she had to give me another dose of local anaesthetic. Then the nurses applied a tourniquet, and squeezed my blood up my arm to the other side of it. (I hate anything to do with blood.) At this point, they start the clock. Can't leave the tourniquet on too long.

The surgeon wore those little specs with microscopic magnification (very trendy she looked) and had located and attached the nerve ends in no time. The theatre sister was impressed.

Then came the time to remove the tourniquet. "You may get a little bit of pins and needles," she told me. Off came the strap, and WANG! Violent electric shocks shot down my arm and nearly sent me into orbit. Talk about understatement.

For ten days I was in plaster, terrified I was going to do something that would ping the stitch apart. Silver-haired men aimed at me, gangsta boys treated me with great courtesy.Everyone assumed I had been drunk when the accident occurred. And, of course, I couldn't drive.

You know, maybe I should get a proper mouse to use on my laptops. I never thought of that before.