He’ll never fully recover. He knows it, and I know it. But I don’t care. In fact, I think his injury is a valuable lesson to men that they should acknowledge their physical decline. Middle-aged men’s pigheaded denial that they aren’t what they once were is unsafe for us all. Larry’s eyesight had degenerated to a point where he ate as much ratshit as rice. But he abjured the wearing of eyeglasses as a foppishness practiced by metrosexuals and bookworms. He held objects out at arm’s length when he wanted to see them clearly, just like his granddad did. And it worked until his arms grew too short, just like his granddad’s had.

The day of the injury he showed up as cheerful as ever. Scented vaguely like a hospice, but ready to go. It was hot working out in the sun and he steadily reddened until, about mid-afternoon, he was done. Overdone. Cooked. Scalded. Confused. I said to him, ‘‘You’re as burnt as an effigy, dude.’’ ‘‘Can’t be,’’ he insisted. ‘‘Covered in blockout.’’ He skittered sideways like a crab as he spoke. He drove home early in his ute and a delirium and was off work for a week sunstruck with second-degree burns.

See, Larry had a lady friend who he’d called out to in bed that morning asking if she had any sunblock, ’cause he’d run out. And she’d called back yeah, sure, it’s in my handbag. So he lucky-dipped in her tan Gucci and fished out a tube of ointment and held it out into the twilight zone at arm’s length where things are whatever you want them to be, and out there it looked enough like sunblock that he wrung the tube dry and basted his head with its contents before calling out goodbye to the lady friend whose antifungal cream he had used as sunblock.

The cream had no efficacy against UV radiation and no placebo effect either. It was used to combat thrush not baste turkeys. So Larry was cooked and subsequently lambasted.

For his mates the jokes wrote themselves. What a pertinent ointment to slather Laz, etcetera. They’d have been the same jokes if he’d used haemorrhoid cream as an aftershave, I suppose. Larry’s burns healed, but living in a small town he rarely meets anyone who isn’t now besieged by smirk. On building sites wiseguys leave sombreros and parasols lying around for him.

Every time I wash my hair with conditioner instead of shampoo I think of Larry. Every time I take one of the dog’s worming tablets for a headache I realise my arms have got too short ... like Larry’s and Larry’s granddad’s arms did. An optometrist? Not yet. Laz-like, I’m wary of jumping on the artificial crutches of modernity prematurely. Who wants to look like Scott Morrison or Ronnie Corbett?

I guess what I’m trying to advocate here is a ready admission of our physical decline. A simple pair of glasses would’ve saved Larry second-degree burns and from wandering evermore in a terrain of sombreros.

Yesterday I held a habanero at arm's length to identify it as a radish before biting into it. In my excruciations I thought of Larry, wisps of steam catching sunlight, rising off his pulsing red skull.