ouch

Being short has its disadvantages, I'm sure. Not being able to reach things off high shelves, dogs licking you in the eye, people farting in your face, that sort of thing. Swings and roundabouts, though - I suspect if you did a survey of the scalps of tall and short people you'd find the tall people had a much more fascinating and varied collection of scrapes and gouges, and of course this would be because they're far more prone to walking into things built to cater for Joe Average, who if I remember correctly is (in Britain anyway) about 5 foot 9. I'm not exactly freakishly tall (6 foot 1 first thing in the morning, a smidgen less in the evening as my spinal discs are slowly crushed by the weight of my head), but my scalp is like a relief map of Switzerland. Some of the reasons for this are detailed in this recent post (though strictly neither of those were height-related incidents), but there have been numerous other head-damaging incidents, a cracking (quite lidderally) example of which occurred this morning.

Our kitchen occupies the rearmost part of the ground floor of the house, and occupies an extension built quite a bit later than the rest of the house. This extension has a much lower ceiling than the rest of the house, as well as a lower doorway which you have to duck slightly to get through. Here's a photo.


Now after a short while the slight stoop as you go through becomes second nature, but if you're suffering from a bit of pre-coffee bleariness in the morning you can forget, and what you get then is this:


That's a photo of the top of my head. A couple of interesting footnotes are a) Christ, it's all a bit bald up there (though ironically this helps the wound show up better) and b) I don't know if you've ever tried taking a photograph of the top of your own head, but it's not all that easy, particularly if you're aiming for a particular spot. I had about five goes before getting one that was in focus and had the relevant scabby area in it.