It’s Not What You Think. Chris Evans

time, I had broken myself.

      My one punch to the chin of the angry kid had been too much for my soft, little round knuckles to take, they really did hate fighting and this was the last straw, they had chosen to defend themselves instead of me and to show their disdain for such a pastime they had physically retreated into the palm of my hand.

      ‘Ouch,’ I thought as I realised it was now hurting, ‘that looks awful.’ ‘Brilliant,’ I thought next. ‘This is my passport out of here. The angry kid will be fighting his own shadow at home-time if this is half as bad as it looks. My fingers are obviously broken. There must be a hospital trip in this. It might even be an ambulance job. Hurrah, thank you God, let me know how much I owe you.’

      Of course I waited for Columbia to launch before approaching the teacher. My hand had now begun to throb and no doubt was becoming less salvageable by the minute but there was no way I wanted to miss the launch. Besides, now that I knew I was off the hook with the angry kid, my hand may have been hurting like hell but my heart was singing—to the high heavens. With Columbia safely on her way it was time for me to disclose the nature of my injury and get the heck out of there.

      There’s nothing like presenting a teacher with a genuine injury, is there?

      Teachers are so ready for lesson-dodging excuses that when one is able to confront them with the real deal, one is flushed with a swell of satisfaction as the expression on their face gradually makes the journey from scepticism, all the way through to concern—stopping off somewhere in between to register a mixture of disappointment and guilt when they realise they might have to actually do something about the situation.

      And so out came the trowel as I prepared to lay on the thick stuff. I took great pleasure in informing my class mistress of the obvious pain and anguish I was experiencing while offering up my increasingly ballooning right paw as evidence to such truths. I had to admit, it did look pretty dramatic, I also let her know, in no uncertain terms, that I had heroically postponed the reporting of my serious injury so as not to interrupt such momentous an event as the Space Shuttle ‘take-off ’ with such a trifling matter as my hand, which was about to ‘drop off ’.

      Twenty minutes later I was home and free—well, I was actually in the hospital and free and boy, did it feel good. I had gone from condemned zero to resilient hero in less than half an hour. My initial sense of relief was quickly developing into a wave of unbearable ecstasy. Life felt mighty sweet, I can tell you. I was out of the woods and would soon be scampering down into the valley. I might have to go back to school the next day but there was no way the angry kid could pick a fight with me if I had a plaster on my arm. It wouldn’t be worth the bad ‘rep’. He would have to hold on to his anger for at least six weeks and anything could happen in that time—there could even be a war!

      But, as we know, the karma police are never far away and they were about to rain on my parade, big time. One hour later I would be screaming with agony.

      *Amongst many other requests, ‘celebs’ get asked to play football—a lot. As well as being fun, especially for someone who never got picked for the school teams like me, it’s a novel way of gauging your popularity from how big a cheer you get when the teams are announced to the crowd. In my Big Breakfast and Toothbrush days, I was more than happy with the volume of my welcomes. I was playing at Wembley once and Les Ferdinand, the ex-England international, was watching on the touchline. ‘How many times you played here?’ he asked. ‘I think this’ll be my seventh,’ I replied. ‘That’s more than me!’ he exclaimed. Not everything is always right in this world of ours.

       Top 10 Things that Freak Me Out

       10 Walking through crunchy snow

       9 Anything that dangles

       8 Trinkets

       7 The lighting in department stores—it makes my eyes sting

       6 The recurring dream where my head keeps falling off

       5 People who don’t like animals

       4 My friend who doesn’t ‘get’ music

       3 My own heartbeat

       2 Anyone else’s heartbeat

       1 Hospitals

      I was screaming and begging for the surgeon to stop what he was doing, pleading with him to relent. I had been transferred to the operating theatre where I was now being worked upon. Things are never as simple as you want them to be, are they?

      It transpired that as a result of my injury my fingers needed to be rebroken as they had originally been broken ‘the wrong way’. I was informed of this shocking development soon after I was admitted to the accident and emergency department. I was told it would be impossible for my fingers to be set in their current state, not an uncommon occurrence apparently. Maybe not uncommon to the medical profession but it was ‘news just in’ to me—as was the local anaesthetic that had since been hastily administered.