Have you ever noticed what terrible injuries we can cause to ourselves by ourselves? Or maybe it’s just me…

Over the years I have spent many long hours building things with wood and I’ve had a number of stupid accidents. Amongst other things, I have managed to hit myself on the forehead with a claw hammer, whack my own shin with a sledge hammer and run a bow saw across my knuckles on numerous occasions. So frequent were these mishaps, that at one point I actually began to question whether I was carrying them out on purpose on a subconscious level; I genuinely think there was about a year there where I could have kept all the doctors at triple west medical employed single handedly.

I have also hit myself on the back of the hand with a hatchet and lost a fingernail after dropping a huge piece of oak on my own digits. Doh! Anyone would think I were a masochist from the way that I go on.

But my accident-prone tendencies are by no means limited to the realms of woodwork… I have impaled my own foot on a rusty bicycle spoke (unattached to the bike at the time), dropped a huge sheet of glass (edgeways) on my un-shoed foot and head-butted a gravestone at thirty miles per hour (the result of a frenzied mountain bike race through a cemetery. A long story…).

My skills also branch out into the unintended mutilation of others. I have fitted a door with four of someone’s fingers trapped in the jamb, drilled into another person’s flesh and I almost broke a child’s back whilst ‘playing’ at school.

As I say, perhaps it’s just me. And the more I think about it, this is probably the case. I was affectionately known as ‘Danger Man’ by people at one time and I certainly lived up to my name. I’m beginning to wonder whether I should have a government health warning tattooed across my forehead…