Well – how did I get here? I’m auditioning – I’ve never had an audition in my life.

I’m barefoot in the Pavilion Theatre, after three weeks of limping, getting lifts & buses, not walking, foot-up etc after the man/machine mashup (id. A Perfect Day Almost) so I haven’t used this foot for a while, and now I’m about to dance. Jason, the rehearsals director, has asked us to dance our names (a request I’ve not heard before), so I’ve been working out a sequence that, well, dances my name.

So – I’ve got it just about, but now we have to integrate our name with a partner’s name. I choose Chris, and look, we both have an H in the middle. His sequence is more compact than mine (mine sprawls, typically, across about twenty feet). So we can coincide with an angular body-H. I forget the foot problem, and we rehearse our little piece together; our H is perfect each time we run through.

When we perform it, the H’s slip a little – disappointing. We’ll see…

Dance your name! Go on – dance your name!

You’ve only got to get a small injury – no, nothing serious, really, thanks for asking – and it calls everything else in your body out on strike. At first, the new injury puts your other little aches and pains into the shade: you don’t notice your shoulder-ache, twinge in your hand, catarrh etc because you’ve got a new complaint. But after a while the foot is a dull ache, and you realise that you’ve now acquired a back-ache, and a hip- and leg-ache, because you’re not walking properly.

But you start to suspect that this was just what your major condition needed, to become full-blown: your hypochondria. Ouch, there’s another twinge – guilt. I’d go to the doctor with my portfolio of (all right, minor) ailments, and go through them, one by one. But then I would be using up at least nine people’s allotted 10 minutes (there’s a sign up saying you’ve got 10 minutes).

Perhaps I’m imagining them all: I’m so in touch with my body I can generate a twinge just by extreme ‘mindfulness’. Outside it, people are slaughtering each other with the usual enthusiasm, public services are being cut and sold so that the Markets can respect UK plc again, and the poor (and not quite poor) are getting poorer.

Ouch – where did that headache come from?