I AM nursing a wound this week, courtesy of the NHS.
Oh, I'm not angry about it – quite the reverse. After months of waiting in limbo-land while my non-urgent piece of surgery gradually came to the top of the pile, I was phoned up and an appointment was made for shortly afterwards.
At 8am on Sunday morning, I was driven into an abnormally quiet Castle Hill Hospital car park and, three hours later, I left with my index finger wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a, well, a sling actually. Not a manger.
And it was almost completely painless.
For the past few weeks I've been waving my bandaged appendage in all directions as I've ignored doctors' instructions and worked on building stages, moving chairs and sweeping up pine needles in the minster to cope with the normal pre-Christmas crush of concerts and carol services – and it's been fine.
However, in the rest of my life it's been a total pain. Down at the trackside of my model railway there's a heap of uncompleted tasks, just crying out to be finished but untouchable until my finger is able to work normally again.
I can't paint, oil or glue anything in case I get muck in my wound. I can't nail or screw any bits of track into place in case I jar or knock my still-recovering flesh.
On the plus side, I can't do the washing up without tracking down a latex glove to cover the dressing, by which time someone else has usually volunteered.
Oh, and I'm not going anywhere near nasty, prickly holly, thank you very much.
However, it's in the writing side of things that I'm most inconvenienced. I've enjoyed many years of touch-typing, firstly on antique Remingtons that you had to hammer with fingers of iron to make contact with the paper, and secondly on modern keyboards that you merely caress.
It took a few years to get used to that changeover, I can tell you, and several early keyboards had to be thrown away after my heavy-handed pounding bent the delicate circuit mountings beneath the keys way beyond their physical limits.
As I work around the problem, all sorts of peculiarities keep cropping up to annoy me.
My latest science-fiction blockbuster, about a pair of cats who have to try to survive in a world without humans, is flagging because fumble-fingers keep typing "cars and bogs", which is unhelpful.
Most of the mistakes, however, are of the "andn so thjsosd is Cristnmas" variety, which are very boring.
I've been hoping that one or two might be random errors that lead to brilliant new jokes or insights, but I'm afraid that hasn't happened yet.
Various spelling and grammar-checking programs pick up most of them anyway, so there's nothing likely to slip through the net and surprise me or you.
So I shall just soldier on, and wish everyone of good spirit a Mucky Christmas and a Hoppy New Beer.
Neil Pickford: by day a mild-mannered virger: by night…he walks the streets and tries to make sense of it all. You can read more of Neil's various meanderings at his website • ThePickfordPapers