gonna end up a big old pile of them bones....

How many times in your life will you specifically need the third finger on your left hand? In conjunction with the other digits, I suppose it's useful enough, but you'd imagine that - at a pinch, and if you really had to - you could manage without it.....

....unless you were getting married in the next few weeks.

Any other time in my life, damaging your ring finger would be annoying and perhaps a touch inconvenient, but it would be something that could be shrugged off and quickly forgotten about. This is more or less exactly what I did in 1991 when I dislocated this finger at the second joint whilst playing rugby. It hurt. It swelled up. I had to strap it up for a few weeks. The joint warped a bit. That was about it. No big deal.

Fast forward 15 years, and I pinged the same joint whilst playing basketball with the Ultimate Olympian at the very end of March. I had a small sense of deja-vu as the joint swelled up and I had to strap my poor finger up, but I wasn't especially worried about it.

Fast forward a month, and the bruising had gone down but the joint itself remained painful and swollen, and - with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight - perhaps I can now admit that taking that stint in goal at football a couple of weeks ago wasn't the smartest of ideas.... I'm rubbish in goals on the whole, but on this occasion I was pulling off some very unlikely reflex saves, mainly with my left hand. I initially felt pretty pleased with myself, but by the end of the game, it was also fairly clear that I was finally going to have to go to the doctor to get this damn finger checked out.

I went last Tuesday and the doctor immediately sent me off for an X-ray and told me to immobilise the finger by strapping it to my middle finger.

I got the x-ray results today.

I've broken my finger.

I don't know yet if it's a clean fracture or if a splinter of bone has broken off and gone through the joint... but 5 or 6 weeks after the original injury, it should have mostly cleared up by now, and obviously it hasn't. I may yet have to take the Frodo Baggins approach and wear the Ring of Power on a chain round my neck for a bit before I can cast it into Mount Doom wear it on my finger.

Ooops.