In the wars

I burnt my hand when I heard Caesar had been stabbed. I was too preoccupied with fantastical thoughts of betrayal and honour, and a time when people lived for their politics. And died for it.

That could be today. That is today.

And so I stood in my kitchen clutching a saucepan lid not long enough off the stove. The pain had not set in; my mind was in Rome, or else the shock was allowing me time to prepare - the running tap, the cold compress.

And for a purpose I also attribute to shock and denial, I thought of Caesar's feet, just as I had once spent an entire afternoon trying to research whether Napoleon had worn socks and whether his fastidiousness, of which i had become fixated, was true of his needing to change them regularly.

I wondered about Caesar's sandals. Did he have someone wear them in before he put them on? And were the undersides of his feet every truly clean?

I wonder this too of my own.

When I traveled abroad, staying in foreign cities on a budget of hostels and baked beans, I would drift off to sleep wondering whether my feet would ever truly be clean again.

I am at home now - I did tell you of the burn in my kitchen - with clean feet and a blister on the pudgy cushion of my palm resembling a snowman with two defined blobs for body and head, formed rather than melted by the heat.