Boys will be boys

THE gaffer had a text message the other day.

Our nephew, Jim, has broken his ankle. How did he do it? He's 21 years old, was out with his mates, had a few too many lagers, misjudged a step off the pavement and took a heavy step down onto the road with the side of his foot, rather than the sole.

We've all done it, but most of us come away with nothing worse than a twisted ankle.

Jim, however, had to have his pinned up. Ouch.

But it doesn't surprise me. It seems to be the lot of ladkind to lug around with them a body blemished with a myriad abrasions, war wounds and reminders of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Think of that trend a few years back when it seemed that every male from the ages of four to 44 had a shaved head. And look how many of them had the white flashes and healed gashes of once-sutured scar tissue on their skulls.

I'm no Evel Knievel, but I've accumulated a fair whack of injuries in my 42 years. And not one of them acquired through derring-do or bravery, either. (How grand it must be, though admittedly highly improbable, to be in a beer garden one summer wearing a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt and having someone point out an impressive burn scar on your arm, only for you to explain that you got it by rescuing a group of orphans from the wreckage of a burning helicopter – but hey, you really don't like to talk about it.)

Being 6ft 3ins and with no in-built grace or artificial horizon whatsoever (disco dancing and tightrope walking are definite no-nos), all my injuries have been caused by that trio of old friends – recklessness, bad luck and sheer stupidity.

As an inquisitive seven-year-old, the first thing I did when I went to live in England was have a mooch around my new gran and granddad's house.

It was a three-storey – four if you count the cellar – Victorian terrace (the only time I'd encountered three storeys or more was in Creasey's).

They had a huge attic and down the twisting uncarpeted staircase a really tempting doorframe that you could launch yourself onto and swing out onto the landing and then back onto the stairs.

So that's what I did.

The first part went well. Unfortunately, the swinging-back bit went badly. My hands loosened their grip and I sailed onto the landing almost horizontal with the floor.

I landed with the base of my skull on the edge of one of those uncarpeted wooden steps.

It's always important when you are seven and move to another country to spend at least three nights in the local general hospital.

A couple of years later there was a carpenter at our house building a small porch. Now, I was an inquisitive kid. I always liked to know how things worked. I'm not saying that he did it on purpose to get shot of me but halfway through our conversation about spirit levels and plumb lines, with him up a step-ladder, the carpenter dropped a large piece of 2x2 squarely onto my head.

So that was back to the hospital for my first set of stitches. Five of the little blighters.

Not long afterwards, middle school beckoned.

Not far from the school there was a great place called Oakworth Park. It was the grounds of a mansion that had burned down, but the surrounding gardens were all landscaped into caves and teetering catwalks, nooks, crannies and tunnels – in fact, the perfect place to go and chat up lasses at dinnertimes.

I was doing this in a place called the Three Bears' House. The lass in question was Deborah Green and she had a voice of chocolate and cigarettes – in fact she was smoking a No. 6 and chomping on a Crunchie as I was halfway up the wall of the house trying to be all erudite and witty. Erudite and witty weren't really working, so I attempted macho irresponsibility, leapt up and grabbed a concrete rafter that had been fashioned to look like a log. My intention was to swing down Tarzan-like and land at her feet.

I had learned a jot from the attic experience. The moment I grabbed the concrete rafter (which had a steel core, by the way) it came away in my hands and I fell seven feet to the floor.

As well as the rafter landing on my head and splitting it open, my left hand had managed to get caught under my backside and I landed on it, breaking my wrist.

Deborah laughed in a splutter of chocolate and a wraith of smoke. (Thanks, Deb.)

Result: Hospital again, more stitches in the head and a plaster cast for over a month.

You'd think that they would, but injuries don't stop when you're a kid. Well, they didn't with me. At 16 (and well into Jimi, Janis and Jim and everything psychedelic) I stood on a rickety chair to watch an electrical storm (man) from my attic skylight. Of course I fell, the cast iron skylight came down and I nearly chopped my finger off.

Hospital again. Bum trip.

I've been bitten by a dog on a cross-country run (tetanus), stood on an upright nail on a building site (tetanus again) and had several more bangs to the head.

I've fallen backwards after a night and day of sheer revelry in London, split my head open (you could see the skull, apparently) and had to have it stitched up at St George's Hospital, Tooting, as Crocodile Shoes by Jimmy Nail was playing on the radio (the most painful part of the evening as it happens – the song, not the stitches).

I don't believe in the afterlife but I had an out-of-body experience when I was unconscious. I was floating around my work's restroom at British Oxygen Company and all my colleagues were supping tea and smoking fags and I couldn't remember their names.

(You don't go to Heaven when you die. Your spirit just floats round an industrial estate in Morden.)

But that was over a decade ago and I've finally put away childish things. Or so I thought.

Last summer the umbrella (ella-ella-ella) over our garden table was beginning to look like a wino's overcoat. So I, with all the best intentions in the world, decided to fix it.

It sagged badly at one side, so I was going to unsag it by tying it up with string.

To make the hole for the string I used a pair of scissors.

No sooner had I cut through the umbrella than a cold pain seared through my finger.

Yep, another trip to the hospital. A scar right above the old skylight one.

So, as I said, Jim's fall didn't surprise me, though the pins did.

Get well soon, mate. You're a 21-year-old bloke.

If you're anything like me, expect more to come.