OK enough of that. I cut my thumb open this morning. I was slicing through a sandwich with the extra sharp bread knife I’m usually so pleased with. For some stupid half-asleep reason I left my thumb dangling alongside the sandwich at the edge nearest me and as the knife slid through the sandwich with a satisfying purr it also slid into the tip of my thumb.

Now, as Kirsty will I’m sure vouch, I’m a huge wimp when it comes to pain but I also have two very definite reactions to it. The first is usually when I’m doing some kind of DIY (or something fiddly) which is usually incredibly frustrating and I hit my thumb with a hammer or something and I end up shouting and swearing and I come over extremely sarcastic and often threaten suicide. Pretty pathetic I admit but it’s usually not the pain I’m reacting to (in these situations I’m never really hurt) but more it’s anger at my own stupidity for doing something so colossally rubbish as hitting my thumb with a hammer.

My second type of reaction is to become very quiet an calm and say things like "it’s fine", and "no, it’s nothing", while Kirsty fusses around asking to look at whatever part of my body I’ve hurt. These are the times when I actually feel like I might have actually done something bad and so it’s again pretty pathetic that I go straight into a kind of denial, as if that’s going to help

Funny thing about this morning was it kind of fell into the gap between the two. I knew straight away that it was a terribly silly thing to do but at the same time the feeling of the knife as it sliced it’s way into my thumb really freaked me out. It felt just like chopping a chicken breast ready for a curry on a Monday night. It also felt really easy, like almost too easy. Surely your skin is meant to put up a bit of a fight, and not just part happily like orange peel (actually I’ve known orange peel put up quite a fight). And so on...