When you bang up your knee so it swells up like an elephant’s and it brings tears to your eyes to take a step, the orthopaedic guy gives you a knee brace to wear requiring four straps to be wrapped tight around the leg and hooked and held tight by Velcro strips, a piece of equipment that I, a professional humourist with less mechanical ability than the average primate, need to remove every night when I go to bed and reattach in the morning. My wife could do this in a jiffy but I made her go to Minnesota to play the opera (she’s a violist) because I love her and because I don’t want her to see me as a pitiful helpless wretch. You understand.

Why should two people be miserable? One is enough.

This week of struggling with the knee brace has changed my life forever. I used to want to be hip and cool and now I just want to be capable. I got wildly lucky finding this woman and she was okay with my being a writer and so she handled all the mechanical stuff — violists have better digital skills — and I sat at a screen and typed. But this week I had to shape up. There are men living in group homes for the immobile because they couldn’t master the knee brace.

New York is a destination for men seeking gender fluidity, you see them in the park wearing skirts — not bearded Celts in kilts but slim sensitive cosmopolitan men with unique pronouns and I think “Okay” but gender fluidity isn’t important for a man with a bum knee. Hydration is important and also urination, and for that you need to walk around.