Last updated 13:27, Thursday, 24 July 2008

I HAVE overcome some pretty nasty injuries in my time.

This tubby little body is a network of scar tissue, with only a leavening of lard keeping it together.

The toughest centurion casting woad-daubed Picts from the ramparts of the Roman Wall probably had fewer battle scars than me.

From the half-inch scar on my left thumb (embedded fishing hook) to the two-inch cicatrix on the little finger of my right hand (son dropped bus gearbox on it) I have more scars than even the most pugnacious student at Heidelberg University.

My right eyebrow conceals evidence of a whack in the face from a pushchair at the age of two, while my left big toe was all but severed in a motor bike accident some years later.

I have been in more car accidents than Dick Dastardly, been toppled from more motor bikes than Barry Sheene, and am well into double figures for bicycle mishaps.

As a youngster, I was once proceeding down a steep hill in the Peak District at a considerable rate of knots, when I deemed it advisable to touch the brakes.

I was catapulted over the handlebars like a sack of King Edwards, as the front forks folded cataclysmically.

This was long before the days of cycle helmets, but although I landed on my head, I was saved from serious damage by my fashionably long haystack of a Beatle haircut, which cushioned much of the impact.

I was knocked out for a while, and awoke at the roadside, covered in blood and confronted by a schoolmate who declared: “I’ll do your paper round tomorrow – if you give me the money in advance.”

My record is non-too-clever as a pedestrian either, following that nasty business some years ago when I was hospitalised by a coal wagon, which upskittled me spectacularly whilst I was playing cricket.

I was warned some years ago that following one particularly spectacular accident involving a rally car, I would be a virtual cripple once I reached my fifties.

It seemed that all four major limbs had shot out of their sockets with the force of the 140mph impact, before re-attaching themselves with a meaty thwack.

Grave-faced medics opined damage to the joints was such that the passage of time would be particularly cruel. Well over 30 years on, I remain reasonably mobile for a fat lad, despite the odd creak and twinge.

But none of these little adventures laid me quite so low as the unfortunate affair with my three-year-old grand-daughter in a Cyprus swimming pool.

We were there for a week, during which time Abbey blossomed from a terror-struck wreck, clinging round my neck like a limpet mine, to a confident mermaid, completely at home in the water – just as long as she was wearing her armbands.

The trouble was, she regarded me as the pool inflatable, leaping on me from all angles, and demanding to be caught as she jumped in.

There was also the game of her own devising called “Catch the Abbey” whereby she was hurled from some distance between myself and her father, or simply tossed into the air as high as possible.

It was a game I used to play with my own children – but I was 30 years younger then.

And thus it was that as the week drew on, my right hip started to lock solid at inopportune moments.

I’ll swear there was an audible grating noise as I rose to my feet, and the sweat burst from my brow in great globules as I tried to build up to walking pace.

I felt as though I needed a squirt of WD40 into my hip to replace the sinovial fluid which had clearly drained away

It was OK once I built up a bit of momentum, but those first few steps were exquisite agony.

I lurched along like a Saturday night drunk as shafts of pain shot through my pelvis, and on one occasion only a handy stone pillar prevented me from toppling over like a windblown Sitka spruce.

Holidaymakers clutched their children protectively around them as I staggered unsteadily past, as though in the grip of the final stages of the DTs.

I seriously thought my hip had shattered like Talos, the statue brought to life in Jason and the Argonauts, but I awoke one morning to find everything back in working order.

Isn’t the human body a marvellous thing!