Writer Injured in Beer-Related Knife Attack!

If I was a log-keeping sort of person, yesterday I would have been able to log our first beer-related injury of 2010.  I aspire to be a person who keeps logs - I might make it a Newish Year Resolution.  My friend Mike has a log of all the books he's ever read which I think is a very good idea. Another friend Ann has a Book of Doom in which she writes all the transgressions - real or perceived - of her husband, Just In Case She Needs It.  It's quite a big book.

A log of drink-related injuries would be incredibly useful.  I could send it, for instance, to the people who compile all the dodgy statistics about the impact of binge drinking.  Because yesterday's incident was actually caused by them, not by alcohol itself, but more of that later.

We don't actually need alcohol to sustain many of the injuries at Beer Towers.  Mr PBBB is frequently shouting 'What now?' in response to a yell / squeak from another part of the house.  Usually it's something like smacking myself on the side of the head with my hairdryer or poking a mascara wand into my eye, but sometimes it's a spectacular smashing of my elbow into a singularly unhelpful piece of architraving or the ripping off of two fingernails trying to open the back door to let Captain out to pee.

I have to admit that not all of my injuries are sustained on the proverbial wagon.  There was the time I came back from holiday with a bruise on my arse so lurid that it apparently 'looked as though I'd sat in a punnet of blackberries'. If memory serves me right, that was thanks to a particularly toxic series of cocktails in a bar in Greece and my subsequent descent down a flight of concrete stairs with an amply cushioned but painful landing.  Then there was the Sambuca stigmata (easy to do if you haven't read the instructions), the dislocated toe (showing off by kicking a wheel, as you do), the traumatised cocyx (doing the can-can with both legs at the same time - people in Bristol still talk about it), a broken toe (dropping a particularly heavy glass on it whilst trying to drink some water to prevent a hangover - there's no justice) and a black eye sustained when I ran into someone's benignly outstretched fist during a fire alarm.

Reading back over this catalogue of disasters, I'm slightly surprised that a) I'm still alive and b) I haven't been tempted to seriously worry about my drinking and get my sorry (and bruised) arse off to an AA meeting, but there you go.  If the options were sensible abstinence or occasional memorable days lost in a mad, laughing, sociable, alcohol-fuelled ruckus with the occasional battle-scar, I'd choose the latter every time.

Anyway, back to the point.  Yesterday, STONE COLD SOBER, Mr PBBB sliced a big chunk of his finger and nail bed completely off.  Claret everywhere.  And it was all the result of a particularly irritating article about beer he'd been reading.  He was so incensed that he stormed downstairs to make a salad with the very expensive, desperately sharp Japanese knives that I'm not allowed to use without washing and drying them INSTANTLY. He banged open the fridge door, still muttering under his breath about the beer thing, threw down the spring onions onto the chopping block and decided that this was the perfect moment to try out some fancy new chopping skills.  It was still bleeding 3 hours later, but as he's from Barnsley he toughed it out with a sticking plaster.

So there you have it.  A completely sober drinking accident, thanks to the wankers with the dodgy statistics.  They should be ashamed of themselves.