- I'd be pretty sure no-one ever has said these things about me.

In truth I'm now old (70's), overweight, and barely mobile given my right leg includes a bad knee and a bad hip. Chronic Arthritis is a gift that just keeps on giving.

The Universe has had a go at killing me a few times. I've fallen off a boat (a canal barge) - a couple of times - had at least one health scare (heart) and fell spectacularly badly off a wet step to break (well fracture really badly) my right wrist.

Recovering from the wrist thing I developed a new condition which I called 'neon arm' which stopped me sleeping much for 3 months or so. If that arm was still for more than a half-hour (like in bed forinstance) the major nerve lit up like a four-alarm bonfire - with me getting the full benefit of that exact sensation.

It was... distracting (!) enough to keep me awake until I got so tired I could have slept through a stampede of elephants; then I slept fitfully through dramatic agonising dreams, which involved waving an arm around that shone like a light-saber. The good times...

Testing my right arm for the neon stuff meant looking at the left one for comparison - turned out the compressed nerve I had in the bad arm was actually in better shape than the one in my 'good' arm. (We'd had two kids, and carrying them around had done a number on me. Who knew?)

I wound up having both my wrists professionally slashed (at different times) by a surgeon reassuringly named "Mr Savage" in what is apparently now called a nerve decompression procedure but used to be a Carpal Tunnel operation. That was not a noticeably good year.

I learned to be ambidextrous and gave up playing the guitar. I was royally bad at it (- the guitar, not ambidextrousism: I hate Tommy Emmanuel) and the effort of playing was just too much. Plus I have a right-handed guitar. Hard to play left-handed - or at all, in my case. Though I did learn to play a Hawaiian Guitar (with a steel bar) when I was rather young - had to do it that way: my hand wouldn't go around a guitar neck to hold chords down!

Despite the current lack of mobility I used to be fairly fit I think - I hated exercise and sports at school (apart from cricket where you could go and 'field' sufficiently far enough from supervision that it was just spending an hour or two in the country watching the locals in action. No running around required.)

Contrast that with the other school sport of choice - Rugby - where you charge madly around a wet field aimlessly trying to grab a ball while other players randomly try to kill the person who holds it and anyone else between them and the prize. That was never fun.

Ooh - I played hockey too; being quite tall and wide I was in goal - which (the good bit) meant more, and thicker pads than anyone else on the field. Well - it was the good bit until I found out why they give you the best pads. You tend to be a target, even for your own side. It was even worse when we played a champion all-girl team (once) and barely got out with our lives... I still have dreams about being chased by screaming teenagers waving clubs.

A later job got me into small bore rifle shooting - another guy there was involved and talked me into it. I was fairly good. It was also a lying-down sport that involved relaxing and killing (in my imagination) from a distance. Outstanding!

And I played squash. In case you're not aware, this involves being locked into a small room with no ceiling where your 'partner' leaps around and tries very hard to hit you in painful places with a small and very solid rubber bullet. I played that for a while until I blew a hole in my knee cartilage (yes, that knee) and then started going to the gym while recuperating, to stay in training and strengthen the leg.

(One of the first things you learn when playing is the way to defend yourself against being hit. Outside of squash it's called 'cowering' - hands & racket over your face, half turn away from the direction of fire, lift the outside knee over the voonerables and duck.)

Can't remember the guy's name, but the fitness trainer at the gym was a fine figure of a man who tended to hang vertically by his toes from a high bar and do 'sit ups' - lifting his upper body up to his knees - while holding maybe 50kg of weight-lifting iron to his chest. He was a nice bloke - and a fitness lunatic.

I used to manage the sit ups, but from a much more refined reclining position - and without the weights.

In between illness and sport I did some work. As a technician in a computer firm in the 1960's, an insurance claims investigator in the 70's, and an insurance broker in the 80's. All the way through my insurance career I thought "Underwriters" - the folks who decide how much to charge for insurance, and how much cover to give - were some kind of aloof genius.

Then while a broker and sneakily trying to get some inside information about a new insurance policy that one company was about to issue, I got a job offer instead.

Given that at that time I was about 20% of the workforce of a new insurance company I got to do everything, including some underwriting. Trust me: 'aloof' and 'genius' are two more things I never heard mentioned about me...

Since we had trouble getting the marketing and PR people to understand how our insurance worked, I wound up helping the legal team write the contracts, helped the PR team with their press briefings and approved the Marketing company's advertising copy. It was actually fun...

Then about 10 years later (you get sneaky one time and look where it gets you...) I had enjoyed the experience of setting up that company so much that I joined another start-up and did it all over again.

We're in the 2000's now, and the company had a bit of a political storm. I left. Some time later I wound up running a customer support team in a contact centre servicing several internet service providers. (To paraphrase some advertising I still admire, I can't tell you which... but it was their consumer advice line!)

I've always been a bit techy - Brokers, Underwriters, copywriters, advertisers - everything depends on communications and computers. But working with and for Internet companies got me to a whole new level.

You won't remember, but the first mobile phones ran WAP ('Wireless Addressing Protocol') for messaging and images, and the displays were basically fancy calculator LCDs. I won't say they were primitive, but one evening a colleague got mischievous and looked up some porn. (Yes, even then...)

After watching it for a few minutes we still couldn't work out which way up to hold the display...

Anyway: we did tech support to help people get used to these new-fangled things. It was a wild time in a strangely old-fashioned way...