Diary - 31 March 2016 | The Spectator

I’d like this to have been one of those Spectator diaries that gives the ordinary reader a glimpse into the sort of party to which they’ll never be invited. Unfortunately, I’m never invited to those parties either; and even had I got the last-minute invitation to scoff Creme Eggs at Henry Kissinger’s Easter shindig, I’d have had to turn it down. My six-year-old daughter fooshed most gruesomely on Friday, and I was hanging out at the Whittington Hospital instead. Foosh is a medical acronym for the sort of injury you get when you Fall Onto Outstretched Hand. It’s common with drunks; and, as in this case, keen amateur acrobats with neither fear nor gymnastic talent. She took a header — or, more accurately, a hander — off a climbing frame and broke both radius and ulna. The big idiot. It had to be reset under general anaesthetic, which meant a night on the children’s ward for us both. The doctors, who winced satisfyingly at the X-rays, were impressed with her stoicism. ‘Banana break,’ they told us. I looked that up on Google, but I still don’t know what it means. I do now have some good recipes for banana bread.

Perhaps I seem blasé. My family are champion fooshers. My sister-in-law fooshed on the dancefloor at her other sister’s wedding. Her boyfriend — who spent the night with her at A&E — himself already had both wrists in plaster at the time: he had broken one wrist playing five-a-side football, then unwisely took to the field the following week and broke the other one. For a fortnight or so they had only one working arm between them and were, presumably, eating their toast without marmalade. Me, I’ve never fooshed. If I go over, I foof — Fall Onto Outstretched Face. Life lesson: never go ice-skating drunk.