Clumsy Child Syndrome

'She is so gracefully clumsy,’ my ballet teacher announced to my mother at the end of my second and last ever lesson.
‘Clumsy’ was a word that was going to pop up frequently when I was the topic of conversation. It would be said in anger, ‘For god’s sake Jessica, can you stop being so clumsy,’ it would be said with a sense of pity, ‘Oh poor Jessie, try to look where you’re going this time,’ and it would be mentioned as the topic of someone’s ‘witty’ joke, ‘here comes Jess, everyone hold on to your drinks!’ – (a joke frequently made by my hilarious father).
As a child, red wine seemed to be my unconscious target.

A particularly vivid memory comes to mind whilst scanning through my large mental list of possible accidents to relate. As an 8 (soon to be 9) year old I was still being dragged along to my parents’ dinner parties. I say ‘dragged’ but in truth I don’t remember being too bothered by it. Sitting silently curled up in the corner of an unnecessarily large sofa I remember being very conscious of the glass of red wine that was being carelessly placed down in between sips. As the adults’ conversation gathered speed, my brain was urging me not to move my legs,
‘DO NOT MOVE YOUR LEGS!’
I was concentrating so hard on not moving my legs that I seemed to fill them up with pins and needles. The tingling fuzzy feeling became so excruciatingly irritating that my leg seemed to lash out, of course knocking over the glass of wine that was standing so proudly on the edge of the coffee table. It’s strange, but moments like this always seem to be remembered in slow motion. The glass slowly shifted its weight to one side and the deep red liquid was forced to slosh out on to the white carpet and spread itself as far as possible across the floor. My father’s eyes shot a disappointed look in my direction and the host of the party hurried to the kitchen to pick up salt which was supposedly meant to magic away stubborn wine stains. My face began to heat up and embarrassment waved at me from across the room. I had plastered burgundy poison over a pristine white carpet and the magical salt was not hiding it. This was at the beginning of the night: dinner had not even begun, so I had to sit in the corner of that unnecessarily large sofa all evening whilst my burgundy poison slyly stared up at me.