It started as a child when I exhibited an exceptional talent for falling. I fell off beds, out of highchairs and prams, down steps and once out of a device designed to hold babies safely to their mother's bosom. This was held by straps that my mother wore across her shoulders and in which I sat, facing her. She had bought this device because, unlike my sister, I was such a huge child that she was no longer able to carry me in her arms and because I showed absolutely no inclination to expend valuable energy by walking.

I am told that she got halfway up the street with me on her maiden voyage with this baby carrier when, just as she was about to buckle at the knees due to my considerable weight, the seat broke. Apparently Mum caught me on the second bounce and the baby pouch was added to the list of things from which I had fallen.

As the years passed, I became adept at falling from trees, swings, seesaws, slippery slides, scooters, go-karts and bikes, and over my own feet. Periodically I would break the monotony of constantly falling out of and over things by knocking myself unconscious on low-lying tree branches, open windows and doors.

I once fell out of a boat, misjudging the distance between it and the dock. As I plummeted towards the water, one arm became entangled in the mooring line which somehow had looped around my upper arm. This saved me from getting wet but in so doing posed another problem - how to extricate my arm from the rope from which I was now suspended over the water, and which was bearing my full weight. It was dark and there was not a soul to be seen. I swung there for some time, my screams of pain lost in the stillness of the night while my mates merrily drank on in the nearby pub.

I even fell out of an aircraft once. Fortunately, it was on the ground at the time. And when I fell off the back of an inflatable banana boat as it was towed across the waters off Great Keppel Island, it came as no huge surprise. One moment I was bouncing along behind the speedboat and the next I was airborne. As I'd once come close to death after being tossed from a speeding camel, being tossed from a boat was hardly a challenge. I landed inelegantly, legs splayed in the air but it has been ever thus. I might have had more falls than most people have had parking tickets, but I never learned the art of doing so gracefully. Some things just don't come with practice.

And so to the shower several days later when I noticed a lump in my groin. Ever ready to diagnose myself with a life-threatening disease, I ran through a mental checklist of the various complaints that manifest themselves as a lump in the groin and had got to blood poisoning - or was that a lump in the armpit? - when the awful truth dawned. Some 18 months ago I had attempted to lift a pot plant the size of a water tank and suffered a hernia. Not again, surely. Hernias were like measles and chickenpox. You didn't get them twice.

So I visited the groin doctor who had no trouble at all remembering me.

   "Do you know what the chances are of you presenting to me with a hernia on your left side after already having had one on the right side?" he asked.
   "Surprise me," I said.
   "Ten per cent," he said, shaking his head.
   "That's good news for the other 90 blokes," I said, knowing that if it had been one per cent, I would have been that one in 100.