Me and Vladimir, we have the same problems

I look like Vladimir Putin.

His is black. Mine is red. I don't know how he sustained his injury. I like to imagine. Mine, I know. I was in a punch up with a mosquito. The sly cheating scoundrel, it waited for my off guard in the night, then skewered me just below the left eye.

I bet it's the sort of miserable cheat who hovered there, taking its time to choose a final victim. It looked at us both, me and Dig, and decided to choose the juiciest and most attractively tender of the pair. The one whose perfume was sweetest, and whose non-whistling, non-hairy face was a joy to destroy.

Well, you can see I look on the bright side. There is one, even to a night time penetration by uninvited enemy who inserts poison fluid by mouth part, because there is always a bright side, you can be sure of that.

For once, I have cheek bone. OK, maybe not the actual bone, and more the swollen, outward turning, high born appearance of a bone somewhere in the vicinity of a cheek. If you look at it from a distance, with your eyes half squinting. Close up, it looks suspiciously like someone punched me in the face.

These days I'm feeling a bit sorry for myself, so I bet I'm right when I say that while the world speculates what happened to my looky-likey Vladimir Putin, no-one round here will notice any difference in me.

Dig certainly won't notice, until he reads this, then shuffles out from behind the mound of printed paper in his office to find me and peer at me. The children won't notice, unless my new grown distinguishing feature is shaped like the absence of breakfast. And no familiar friend will stop me in the street to express concern, lay their hand on my arm and say, Good grief, what happened to you? No. No one will do that. To people round here, I'm just another foreigner face and an ugly one at that, with wild hair, big nose and rolling goose eyeballs.

So I've come here for an online cuddle. I would photograph my bashed up cheek and show you the full horror, but it would put you off your breakfast. You might never come here again.

I'd say it's always worth popping back to grit's day. You never know what happens round here. One day it's a mosquito, and the next it might be news that I've been in a bar room brawl with a political aide in a naked drunken vodka fight over who has the supreme right to rule Russia.