The chair in the picture above was designed and built by God. For the past (as I write) two weeks it has been my only solace, providing some relief from a debilitating condition caused by a lumbar disc herniation, in one word: sciatica.
The sciatic nerve runs through the spine and all the way to the soles of our feet. Because of the herniation, my sciatic nerve is being pinched and, as a result, I feel pain and numbness most of the time but particularly when I stand up, while walking and when I lie down straight. I have to sleep on my right side, only turning to the left for a few minutes at a time, each time enduring a spasm of pain as I turn, to allow the right side a respite from the weight of my body, before returning to the relatively painless right position.
During the day, I can only hobble to the kitchen to make a coffee. I have to literally pull myself up by the handrail to go up the stairs to the bedroom. Taking a shower or even using the toilet are a logistic and painful nightmare. A course of epidural injections I’m undertaking is not proving to be successful, and it seems the only solution for me will have to be surgery.
The “God chair” mentioned above is the place where I have been spending most of my time during the day and, occasionally, also at night when it hurts too much to lie in bed in any position. Sitting down here is the position where I feel most comfortable, where my sciatica hurts least, and where I can most easily allow my consciousness sink into blissful oblivion. Three metres away across the room there’s a TV screen – most of the time just a dark black rectangle. Sometimes I switch it on to hear the latest repeats of Italian football transfer news. On the table in front of the God chair there’s my faithful Asus “EeeBook” – my contact with the outside world.
I had been thinking a few days ago about how many regions in the world have been clamouring for independence. Kosovo, Catalonia, South Ossetia, sometimes Flanders… Who knows, maybe even Brussels Region may one day become an independent state. Is there a limit on how small a region, a city or maybe even a village can be in order for them to declare independence? Taking the line of thought to the extreme I concluded that, since you cannot have a nation with zero population, the smallest possible population count of an independent country should theoretically be one.
And that was how I had the idea that I could well found an independent country myself – the Antonian Republic. The territory of the country is two square metres in area, and consists of the God chair and the grey table, a bit like Malta and the smaller island of Gozo. The population of the Antonian Republic is made up of myself. It’s a constitutional republic, and I am the president.
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