WRONG! It was D!ck, in the kitchen, with the knife, and there was blood EVERYWHERE! It's that blasted cheese I tell you...

OK, I was cutting some cheese for my tea (you damned yankees can stop laughing Right now!) with a "Kitchen Devil" knife, one of those made in Sheffield from Sheffield Steel, you know 'em, the ones like surgical instruments. I held the cheese vertically and pressed down with the knife, the cheese wobbled, and the knife took a minor detour out of one side of the cheese and a third of an inch into my left thumb.

"Tut tut, deary me," I said, "I seem to have cut my thumb."

So there I am, hand over the sink, watching blood dribble out of said wound down the plughole. At times like this one has to stop and decide one's course of action. Clearly a plaster would not suffice, and besides I didn't have any.

Ambulance? Certainly it could do with a couple of stitches, but will they come out to a simple cut or will they tell me to go to local hospital? Phone a mate and get him to take me? Even worse, I couldn't bear his giggling!

In the end I did what I always do, which was run upstairs and sellotape a wad of toilet paper over the wound in an effort to staunch the flow. Thereupon I discovered another little problem: How does one tear off a piece of toilet paper, fold it into a nice little pad, tear off a strip of sellotape, and apply both of them to the side of my thumb with just two hands, one of which has a gash in it, the other being used to hold it shut?

Um... If I let go with my right hand then my left will bleed copiously and decorate everything in shades of red, er...

Add to this the fact that it's hard enough to find the end of the tape at the best of times, with one hand it is merely extremely difficult, with the other it's looking hilariously complicated. What do I have at my disposal then? Three fingers on my right hand and a set of teeth!

Anyway, after much struggling I finally succeeded in getting a small wad of toilet paper together, folded it back on itself and applied a small piece of tape to it to prevent it from opening again, then in one mad dash I removed my right hand from the gash and applied the wad, a small amount of blood seeped onto it but that's okay. Holding the pad in place I wrap a longer piece of tape around my thumb to keep it there and voila! Self-reparation!

The next morning I took the pad off and examined the wound, it'd ceased bleeding and was leaking a small amount of clotting agent, the edges of the wound looked horribly ragged because they had gone all wrinkly - sellotape is not pourous remember - and the thing still stings if I move it the wrong way.

Repeated attempts to hold the edges of the wound together with sellotape almost worked, but any degree of movement combined with the sweat from my hand and the curve of my thumb conspired to pop the tape off the digit, so I applied another pad and left it for the rest of the day, thankful that I don't have to have it as tight as previously because it's stopped dribbling.

By that night all was well, I was left with a red crescent shaped gash on the side of my thumb which was sore to the touch, but the bleeding and the oozing had stopped and I was more or less able to carry on as normal with my life, I had triumphed over adversity, people spoke in awe of me when I passed them in the street, and life was never quite the same for me ever again.

Well, sort of.