and it burns, burns, burns....

I nearly washed my wedding ring down a sink last week.

Anyone who has seen the pictures of me at the wedding struggling to force that same ring over the broken knuckle on my ring-finger will realise just what this means: it means that after something like 4 months since that fateful game of basketball, the swelling in my joint is finally going down. Mind you, I didn't have much time to celebrate this fact as the sinks at work don't have a grill over the plugholes (no, I don't know either), so I had to act pretty fast to avoid the need to go and fetch a plumber.

Later on that same day, I was shaking my hands after washing them, and the ring flew off my finger, requiring some quick reactions to catch it before it sailed across the room.

Clearly time for an adjustment then.

This is actually a visit I have been putting off for a while. I have been doing this partly because I know that the swelling in my knuckle will go down gradually, and I didn't want to get the ring adjusted once, only to have to take it back a month or so later. If I'm totally honest though, the delay was also equally due to the fact that I am mental: I had become fascinated by the way that my once shiny and new ring was wearing... to the extent that I was almost worried about getting it back from the jeweler, all perfect again, only to have to go through the pain of watching that perfection disappear, one scratch at a time.

Yes, I realise that this is irrational.

Yes, I realise that it is entirely inevitable that something I wear on my finger is going to get banged and scraped and a little bit bashed (which is one of the reasons I opted for a platinum ring in the first place, as it's harder than gold).

Yes, I realise that all I have to do is to get the ring polished once in a while - which if free, by the way - and it would all be as good as new again.

I know all of this, and yet it was still virtually inevitable that I was going to fret about this -- anyone who knows what I am like with my glasses (amongst other things) would have been able to predict that. And I did fret, right from the first moment that I looked at the ring in its box, before I had even put the damn thing on, and saw some tiny surface scratches caused by the initial polishing. Once I started wearing the ring, there was no holding me back. I think I'm looking at my ring in almost every single one of those photos.

Perhaps "fret" is too strong a word. I think "mesmerised" might be better. I simply found it fascinating. I'd never worn a ring before, so I was acutely conscious of it on my finger and of every knock that it took in the course of a normal day. I just wasn't able to equate the things that I did with the marks that were appearing on my ring.

Of course, after a while I started to get used to wearing it, and I stopped looking at it quite as often. I still looked, naturally, but I think that the ring stopped looking scratched (bad) as much as having character (good). So, not only was I now getting reconciled to this, but I was even tentatively starting to like the way it looked.

And then I got the ring re-sized (it was made 4 sizes smaller) and it came back all shiny again, and I was facing up to the prospect of scuffing it up all over again.

As it happens, I haven't really had any time to worry about that as something else has come up.... quite literally. It's been quite hot here over the last few days, and the higher temperatures coupled with the process in the jewelers of trying on sample rings for size and taking them off again, putting my own ring on as it was being resized and taking it off again... all of this has combined to irritate the joint in my finger to such an extent that it has swollen up again. Not so much that the ring was compressing my finger, but enough that I couldn't get it on and off without a struggle. The best thing would therefore be to leave it well alone, but as my finger continued to swell, I couldn't stop myself trying to see if I could still get the ring off, irritating the joint more and more each time I tried.

In the end, I have had to take the thing off entirely and will have to wait a few days to see if the joint goes down again (now the ring is smaller, it no longer fits on the finger of my right hand either).

And you know what else?

I was just putting the ring back in its box, when I noticed a mark......

Gah!