My auntie Pat lived up the back of Port Glasgow, not far out of Glasgow, close to Greenock.
Poor, very, very poor.
She was married to Hugh. He was a bit of a miserable old goat, but I knew her from when I was very young, not so well, not really close, but she was a fixture of our family life.
Later in her life (and this is some years ago), she suffered a massive stroke, was taken to hospital, completely paralysed on the left-hand side, had a little bit of aftercare and then shipped home to the top of Port Glasgow to a tiny little maisonette house with a 'back garden' that was made of patio slabs and a few weeds.
And so, that was the end of Pat. Except it wasn't.
Pat got herself back up out of a chair and started to stumble a few steps around the living room just each day.
A little while later, she managed to make it to the back door a little while after that, onto the slabs; a little while after that, she was doing laps of the slabs (a bit like Major Tom), just trying to see how much she could do back and forwards, back and forwards.
She never got back to complete full health; she got pretty close out and about, seeing the family, meeting people, seeing friends.
It was those little steps in the living room and the laps of the patio slabs that did it.
I've thought about this a lot, just while I'm doing my own daft rehab of my knee.
I'm so impatient at 5 weeks, I can't believe I'm not back or better than I was before, but it takes the laps of the patio, and it's intrinsic, not extrinsic.
You have to be arsed, and you have to want it.
"Get busy living or get busy dying".
Blog Post Number - 4191