‘The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom,’ espoused German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Having spent the past fortnight in the grip of both, after fracturing my femur so disastrously it necessitated a total hip replacement, I can confirm he’s correct. And given I did it tripping in a hotel restaurant, I would add ‘shame’ to the list. The pain was excruciating; the shame even worse. (History will record that the Free Solo daredevil Alex Honnold successfully climbed the 508-metre Taipei 101 tower, without safety ropes, in the same week I failed to navigate a six-inch step.) But the boredom’s been stupefying. If I had a plan how best to drive me to an early grave, it would be exactly what my surgeon has instructed: no drinking for a month (if there’s one thing more soul-destroying than voluntarily doing Dry January, it’s being forced to), no flying for three months, no swimming or golf for four months, weeks on crutches, and daily monotonous rehab.
What to do with my shattered bone? ‘When my father cut off his fingers in the lawnmower,’ said the singer James Blunt, ‘I buried them and held a wake. We could do something with your old hip.’ Then came the kicker: ‘I’d be happy to do the music.’ On balance, I determined my poor old joint had suffered enough. It was incinerated instead.
Since surgery I’ve been insomnia-ravaged, so movies are my early-hours buddy. My selection rule is first to read the Guardian review, and if the woke bible’s critics hated it, I watch it. Obviously, they loathed Amazon’s new documentary about Melania Trump, branding it ‘horrific’, ‘dispiriting’, ‘deadly’, claimed it ‘doesn’t have a single redeeming quality’, and concluded: ‘Two hours of Melania feels like pure, endless hell.’ I thus enjoyed it. But then I’ve known the First Lady for 20 years and get on very well with her. In private, she’s a warm, funny and self-aware woman; in public, she conducts herself with remarkable poise and dignity amid all the scandalous mayhem that constantly swirls around her divisive husband. And I suspect she’s the only human being Donald ever really listens to when he needs talking down off the crazy wall. Something he acknowledged at the movie’s premiere: ‘She’s very measured. Sometimes when I’m not so measured… she measures you!’
I texted President Trump and asked him to pass on my congrats to his wife. ‘Thanks Piers,’ Trump replied immediately (if you message him in the early morning – it was 7 a.m. his time – or late at night, your chance of a quick response exponentially increases). ‘The World needed a big dose of Glamour. Love that you liked it! See you soon. President D.J.T.’ Then minutes later, he called. ‘You’re the toughest critic I know,’ he chuckled, ‘so your words will mean a lot to her. How are you?’ ‘Not great, actually… I managed to be a complete idiot and break my hip in a fall.’ ‘OUCH!’ he exclaimed when I told him how I did it. ‘You didn’t see the step? Was it the same colour as the rest of the flooring?’ ‘I think so, why?’ ‘Because we had a big problem with a step inside one of the Mar-a-Lago ballrooms that people kept missing and then breaking bones. It was happening all the time. So I got them to make the step a different colour and people stopped falling over!’ Sometimes, Trump lives up to his self-acclaimed moniker of ‘stable genius’.
‘Have you ever broken a bone?’ I asked, assuming he would rattle off a long list of big, beautiful breaks the like of which nobody’s ever had before. ‘No, never – thank God! I’d hate that. How long’s the rehab gonna take?’ ‘I’ll be golfing again by May.’ ‘When you’re ready, let’s have a round together.’ ‘Very kind, Mr President, I’d love to.’ ‘I’m not being kind – I just like the idea of taking your money!’
My physio’s been motivating me with ‘you’re still reasonably young’ entreaties, but cold, hard reality set in when I listened to the world’s no. 1 podcaster Joe Rogan discussing me: ‘Piers fell and really fucked himself up. They say your life-span post hip surgery is like, ten years. He’ll probably do better than that…’ Probably?! I’m assured my new titanium hip should last at least 20 years, and I fully intend to outlive it. But airport security is going to be fun. ‘You’ll go off like a Catherine Wheel,’ warned my doctor.
As Schopenhauer also said: ‘Life is a constant process of dying.’ Sometimes it takes a serious injury to remind ourselves of that truism. Well-meaning people (my mother!) say this is God’s signal for me to slow down. But I feel the complete opposite. The clock’s ticking – for all of us. Carpe diem!
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