There are certain things you can just about manage with a fractured arm (please, this is a family newspaper) like brushing your hair, typing with one hand and showering.

But many other things are just downright impossible – grinding pepper, anything to do with a bra, writing, washing your hair, shoe laces and, more importantly, driving.

Which means you have to ask for help, something I’m not very good at.

But then if you do go and fracture your elbow on the first day of the school holidays, it’s going to call for some serious input and calling-in of favours.

Until then everything was in place: kids’ clubs booked, work sorted, holidays planned, and then I take something out of the oven, turn and whack my elbow full pelt into the edge of the cast-iron door.

I nearly blacked out, as it happens, and then tried not to be sick in the sink.

I was carried to the chair but sitting there made me nauseous, so was laid out on the couch while everyone peered at me and discussed what to do with me.

Accident and emergency was the answer I had been dreading but at 6pm on Friday night I was taken there.

I was too embarrassed to tell anyone what I had done.

They all wanted something glamorous, or a hilarious drinking injury incident, but when the lady waiting next to me in A&E admitted she that had been picking up dog poo in her garden and had fallen down a hole, I felt a bit better – she broke her ankle by the way.

The doctor didn’t believe me. How can you break your arm on an oven? Good question. At least it was more original than walking into a door, but she obviously thought Mr Greedy had been beating me, until she turned and saw him waiting patiently in reception wearing my yellow handbag, and changed her mind.

“So will you be able to work?” she enquired. “No, I’m a journalist,” I admitted.

“Oh dear,” she said with a smile that would wilt sunflowers, as if to say “well you deserve it then”.

So here I am, tapping away with one hand, my left by the way and I’m right-handed, and trying not to scream in frustration. But at least I’m proving them all wrong and working anyway. Just don’t ask me to mow the lawn.