I suspect that 99% of the population are injured. They’re just not aware of it. In order to feel under the weather, you have to know what it’s like to be on top of the weather.  Moreover, one person’s weather isn’t necessarily the same as another’s. Ask anyone in New Orleans.

This hip thing is ruining my life.  It’s driving me mad because for the last six months I haven’t been able to run like I did for the last thirty years.

The people I work with probably have hip things, but because they wouldn’t even dream of walking upstairs to the office when there’s a perfectly good lift, they don’t realise they’re in excruciating agony and severely depressed through endorphin withdrawal and consequent loss of self-esteem.

First, I tried to fix myself. I reasoned that if I bought some new, extra-soggy shoes (a technical term) and ran off-road in thick mud, it would so reduce the impact on my joints that I’d be fine in a week.

It almost worked. I could manage an hour around the local fields before I began to list to starboard like a foundering trawler. But then my foot got stuck in a bog and I wrenched my knee so that it swelled up like a pumpkin.

By the time I sorted the knee out, the hip pain had begun to intrude into my non-running time. It would wake me in the night and my leg would suddenly go dead on me, halfway downstairs.

I hobbled the hundred yards to the gym every day, hammered myself to shreds on the stairs machine and developed – well, if not a six-pack, then a small keg – through my Pilates-style ‘core stability’ exercises. All of this helped, but only because I felt I was doing something. 

When you’re injured, it’s the helplessness that really gets to you. If someone with enough letters after his name and  sufficient personal charisma prescribed a course of French knitting, you’d hurl yourself into it with a pathetic degree of enthusiasm. Because at least you’d be doing something.

I went to a Harley Street chiropracter. She took an X-ray of my pelvis. It was wonky. She identified two seized joints in my lower back and set about ‘adjusting’ them. ‘Adjusting’ is one of those terms like ‘precision bombing’ that doesn’t quite match the reality.

After a dozen sessions, the joints were noticeably more mobile. As were the other two dodgy ones she discovered halfway down my spine. I’m honestly glad about this. I’m sure, in the long term, it will benefit me in all sorts of ways. But as John Maynard Keynes once declared, ‘In the long term, you’re dead’. And unfortunately, it still hurts me to run.

She took another X-Ray of my pelvis. (Good job I’m no longer bothered about breeding. Were I to sire another child, it would probably have six legs and weird, telekinetic powers.)

I am now one of the only patients in Harley Street’s famously-mercenary community to receive free treatment. I’ve become a medical challenge, a chiropractic cause celebre. They will cure me, whatever it takes, whether I like it or not.

I only wish they would, and I still believe they might.

I’m worried, though, about the wear in my right hip that showed up on the last X-Ray. My chiro says it doesn’t look bad enough to explain my ‘discomfort’. But she also says you can’t always tell from an X-Ray…

I’m beginning to wonder if my running days are done.

Meanwhile, looking on the bright side, I’ve heard some encouraging things about knitting in the style of the French.