ooh, goody, I'm a mess of scar tissue, me
On my forehead, just on the hairline (well, slightly below it now, but that's the ravages of time for you), smack in the centre*, is a nice little scar that still, nearly a quarter of a century after the injury that caused it, manages to make me look like I'm turning into a Klingon whenever I'm overly angry or out of puff.
* [edit] it's in the same place and looks very similar to Mr Logic's one about 15 or so posts down

On the edge of the woods just behind my house, one of our ever-so public spirited neighbours had dumped a load of smashed up hard old lino. This stuff was like Bakelite, and there were large jagged slivers of it, which could easily do you a mischief.

My friend Martin and I, being only 7 years old at the time, thought this was great and decided to play a game we called "Flying Daggers". It involved flinging the larger slivers (rough isoceles triangles, 6-8 inches long and 2-3 inches wide at the base) at each other from a distance of only a few metres. The aim of the game was to catch one of these spinning emissaries of bloodied doom.

I did.

Right in my forehead.

I would've carried on playing, too, but the blood trickling into my eyes made it hard to see.



my second favourite scar came as a result of being threatened with a gun:
It was dusk in the summer of 1988. I was playing out the front with some friends and, for some reason, one of them ran inside to tell his dad on us. The dad came out and, jokingly, threatened to get his air rifle out and shoot us.

Naturally I legged it indoors. Or I would've done, had the grass not been so damp. I slipped on our front lawn and landed with my knee at the exact point where concrete meets grass, splitting the patella (that's the knee cap, for those of you who don't watch Casualty) in twain. A gaping gash bisecting my knee, with the innards plain for all to see. I howled in agony and my parents came rushing out. My dad scooped me up and carried me to the car, then they rushed me to the General Hospital, which had a casualty unit that knew me well (I'd been in and out with various injuries frequently over the previous 10 years or so). Apparently I was rather green at this point (well, not my lower left leg, which was covered in claret, but you get my drift) and hyperventilating like nobody's business, so they stuck me in a wheelchair and rushed me through, despite the waiting room being full of rugby players and drunkards in various shades of blood red.

The nurse who saw to me had the sympathetic bedside manner of Dr Josef Mengele and, amongst other bizarre control methods, threatened to make me breathe into a paper bag if I didn't stop hyperventilating. She stuck a very big hypodermic needle into the bloodied chasm that had been my kneecap and was about to inject it with anaesthetic when there was a loud crash from the other half of the 'dirty theatre' (as the unsterile casualty operating theatre is known). Turns out some bloke had fainted watching his son have his ear sewn back on (he'd cut it off with a rusty tin lid somehow, possibly in a Picasso-inspired act of whore lust, I'll never know). She propmptly left me, bloody big needle in my knee 'nall, and went over to give succour to this spineless wimp. Not only succour, mind, but my wheelchair, too. The cow.
Anyway, she eventually came back, stitched me up good and proper, and sent me on my way.
I had to spend the remaining 3 weeks of the summer sat on my arse, changing the angle of my knee from straight to bent once a day so it didn't get too stiff, while all my mates were having races round the block, long-jumping and throwing ersatz javelins made from saplings, inspired by the olympics of that same summer.
I felt like Jimmy Stewart in rear window (not that I knew it at the time, taut psychological dramas not being a staple of the young atomboy's film diet) and, to a lesser extent, Bart in the Simpsons' spoof of the same (not that It'd been made at the time, obviously).

To this day I have a broad, raised scar about 4 inches long across it and a kneecap so knobbly that I'd be a shoo-in at any 1950's Butlins knobbly knees competition.
( atomboy, Fri 4 Feb 2005, 13:56, Reply)