My normally jolly grin has been replaced by a rictus of suffering and my usual carefree gestures have frozen into a couple of robotic jerks.

It's my fault as well, all this pain. I shouldn't have twisted as I picked up my grandson, Thomas, but I did, back in the carefree times a week last Sunday.

And as I lifted and twisted, I felt something click; actually, I felt a multiplicity of clicks that actually sounded like the
word "multiplicity". I picked and twisted and heard the word "multiplicity" and somebody pushed a hot crocheting needle into my back and poured boiling pea soup into the hole.

I'm a bit of a fan of pea soup, as it happens, and I've not had any for a while, and whoever was pouring it must have known that because they poured panful after panful in there. They were painful panfuls, I can
tell you.

I limped home, pushing Thomas in his buggy up a steep hill; I stupidly thought this action would help my back, but it didn't. Oh, it didn't.

At home, I found that if I walked up and down the hall rubbing my back and at the same time lifting my legs high like a Barnsley entry in the dressage section of the Olympics, it helped a little.

My wife walked by and I could see she was trying not to laugh.

"Laugh if you want!" I said, bitterly.

She put her hand over her mouth.

I found a very old tin of Deep Heat spray. Its use-by date was probably sometime in the days before Channel 4 started, but I thought I'd give it a go. I found that the twisting round to spray it on outweighed any soothing benefits it might have had.

It was cold, though, and then hot, so at least it gave the illusion of working. I sat on the settee, which was a mistake. I couldn't get out.

"This is what I've got to look forward to," I thought, grimly, as I hauled myself up by the settee arm and the pea soup got poured in again.

I felt oddly hysterical, as though I needed to laugh, which was also a harbinger of things to come. My wife found one of those hot pads that you warm up in boiling water and then apply to the sore area: I remembered that it had done wonders for a sore shoulder a few years ago.

"You don't have to wait for the pan to boil," she said. "You can just put it in the microwave."

My wife is right most of the time, as she herself would admit, but this
time she was wrong. Thirty seconds in the microwave and the thing was white hot and bled a kind of molten blue gravy.

So that was that. I told my wife and she said I should have read the instructions, then turned back to the three-man fencing or whatever Olympic sport she was watching.

We then spent the week in Edinburgh, at the Fringe Festival. I found that the bed in our hotel was nice and hard, so that was okay, but the chairs were soft, which wasn't. The seats in the various venues
and cafés and bars we went in had to be sat in gingerly as though they might break, when all the time it was me that was in danger of shattering.

We came home and now the urge to laugh through the mist of agony became almost overwhelming. I felt I was going mad.

My wife went to the supermarket and brought back a ready meal for our teenage son. It was corned beef hash and had the words "corned beef hash" on the packet with a photo of some corned beef hash next to the words.

I laughed and laughed until I cried and my back felt like someone was beating it with a hose. All I could do by way of explanation was point to the words "corned beef hash".

Then, that evening, I really wanted to sit somewhere comfortable. My back seemed to be getting better and I was fed up of hard chairs. I didn't want to risk the settee, though, so I settled for the floor. The hard floor, with my back against the settee.

Then, when it was time to go to bed, I found I couldn't get up. I was frozen like a statue. The pain was immense and unending. I howled with laughter and tried to get up by forcing myself onto all fours and grasping the TV table.

My wife was laughing, too. "The life of a celebrity!" she gasped.

My laughter increased until I couldn't breathe and I made one final effort to get up, which forced me to break wind hugely, making the sound of a child practising the trombone. This reduced us both to quivering blobs of jelly. Somebody was driving a tractor over my back and I was laughing.

Well, they say we're daft in Barnsley!