I never go anywhere without a small, hard ball about my person. Sciatica, you see. In my case it involves a shooting pain originating somewhere in the depths of my left bottom cheek which, well, shoots down my leg. Something to do with the sciatic nerve being irritated or compressed. Most unpleasant, I tell you, and the longer I sit, the worse it gets.
I have only three routes to relief. One is to never sit down, which is impractical. The second is to be brutalised by a softly spoken Bulgarian masseur called Vlad, which is a wonderful if challenging experience, but too expensive to indulge in more often than every other week. The third is to sit on a hard ball. I was advised to try this by a physio friend, although I think it may sit outside the physiotherapeutic mainstream as it doesn’t come up on the internet. So proceed at your own risk. It was a hockey ball my physio advised me to use, while driving. So next time the pain kicked in, two hours into a 10-mile journey on the M6, I reached for the ball, slipped it under my left cheek and, by God, did it do the trick. The relief was so intense that I was almost glad I had sciatica – if I hadn’t had it I may never have known this joy.
