Now here are a couple of items I might wish had been around some years ago, when I was staying with friends in the UK, Walter and Jackie. Their lovely old manor house was set in farmland and, one Saturday morning, we decided to hitch the trailer onto the tractor and clear up the previous day's hedge-cuttings. The hydraulics on the trailer had long-since broken so Walter had taken to using a large iron bar as a lever with which to elevate the trailer, which I tried to locate onto the ball. Unfortunately, steel on steel was a bad idea and, in the process of the trailer's progress down the iron bar, one of my fingers was chopped off!

While I was staring at the stump, Walter suddenly disappeared from view. I looked over the trailer and saw that he had fainted! Throwing him over my shoulder, I carried him back to the house and, when I banged on the front door, Jackie opened it and promptly passed out! Unbeknown to me, Walter's pale shirt was drenched in the blood from my finger and his wife had thought the worst for her husband!

Three shaky people were given a pot of tea by the housekeeper and, thus fortified, we decided something should be done about my finger which, for the time being, I had bandaged and enveloped in a plastic bag, with an elastic band around my wrist to hold it in place. The uncomfortable sensation in my finger slowly escalated to pain. Holding my hand above my head reduced the pain and less blood seemed to fill the bag.

Walter, having recovered, brought his old Mercedes round to the front door and the two of us hurtled down the drive, leaving a flurry of stones and dust in our wake!
Opening the sun roof, I stuck my hand up in the anaesthetizing breeze. Walter gave me a passable demonstration of riding with a Formula 1 driver and we soon arrived at the local hospital. By now, I was experiencing enough pain to make me nauseous and wasn't feeling at all myself.

Walter commented that I had gone 'a funny color' and charged off to find a doctor, or nurse. Being German-Swiss and having, metaphorically-speaking, huge elbows, he had a doctor by my side within minutes, enquiring as to whether I was experiencing any pain. I thought maybe all his patients had faces the color of rancid fat and dripping with sweat but I let it pass. I was ushered into his surgery and a nurse disposed of the shopping bag containing a good half pint of my blood, whilst telling Walter, in no uncertain terms, to wait outside.

When the nurse had cleaned the stump up, the doctor injected a slow-release anaesthetic, to my great relief. At that moment, Walter and one of his farm hands rushed into the surgery, the latter clutching a bottle full of ice with my severed finger embedded in it - he had found it underneath the trailer.

The doctor told us to go as fast as we could to the Queen Victoria hospital in East Grinstead, a fifteen-minute drive away, where the finger could be micro-stitched back on. My stump had been dressed and the pain had subsided. In fact, all was well with the world. Walter pulled into the traffic and we were off to the internationally famous hospital where the term 'guinea pig' was first applied to humans. Specializing in burns and disfigurements, plastic surgery was pioneered there, on young pilots and aircrew severely maimed during the Second World War.

Just outside East Grinstead, there is a lovely old pub. I thought it might be some time before I got another opportunity to eat or drink. It was about noon and I don't eat breakfast.
"Let's stop for a quick beer and a pie" I said to Walter.
"Why not?" said he.

Inside the pub, the smell of roast beef hung deliciously in the air. First things first, two pints of best 'bitter' ale were acquired and we settled down to discuss the events of the morning - how kindly the nurse, how fortunate that the farm hand was so observant and so on.
"Same again, old boy?"
"Why not?"
"You like roast beef too, Walter, so let's scrap the pie idea and have roast beef!"
"Why not?" Walter obviously thought this was a great idea but, without a good bottle of wine, the beef would be lacking companionship...

Roast beef, Yorkshire Pudding, roast potatoes, sprouts and peas, with generous dollops of horseradish sauce, enjoyed with a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape which, somehow evaporated whilst we were discussing the plans for sheep movement the next day and had to be replaced with another and a wonderful luncheon ensued.

After coffee and brandy, we settled the bill and resumed our journey towards the hospital. We came to a halt outside the reception area and a chap in a white coat, arms folded across his chest, asked whether I might be the man with the missing finger. Once this had been confirmed, he went into a tirade about how this was a quarter past three in the afternoon and that he had prepared for surgery upon receiving a call at eleven thirty!

Having told Walter to get lost, this rather irate young Australian ushered me into his office where I handed him the bottle containing my finger. The message, as he threw it into the waste-paper basket was that the digit was no longer of any use whatsoever. His lack of enthusiasm for sewing my finger back on was disappointing and I said as much. He asked whether I played the piano, or perhaps the guitar. I said that I did not but might want to take one or the other up at some time in the future.

Ignoring my remark, the doc inspected my stump and declared that my injury, being of the farmyard variety, required me to have a tetanus injection. Before administering what looked like a rather large dose, he warned me that it would be very uncomfortable but, having spent much of my life being mauled by members of his profession I assured him that a little jab in the buttock was unlikely to phase me. The medication was promptly administered and, as I had thought, I had no problem - at least not straight away.

He would, the doctor said, operate to 'tidy up' the stump at five that afternoon. I thanked him and set off to walk around the pretty gardens and grounds of the hospital. After five minutes, my right buttock felt as though a mule had kicked it and within ten minutes, my accident of the morning seemed like the thing I had been attempting a few minutes earlier - a walk in the park!

When I arrived for the surgery, I could not sit down and couldn't wait to be anaesthetized! When I came around, the following morning on a ward, there was no pain and the sun was shining. Propping myself up I took a look around the ward at my fellow patients who seemed to be in such great humor. The laughter was coming from men with no faces and burns so terrible that no horror film I have seen could match the spectacle.

An overturned dumper truck had cleaved a young man's arm, lengthways, leaving just a thumb and index finger. There were men with strips of skin taken from their thighs and applied to different parts of their bodies. I looked down at my stupid finger and counted the time, effort and energy spent on it, feeling ashamed, embarrassed and irresponsible. Getting up, I checked out immediately, with my tail firmly between my legs.

As I was saying, all of this might have been prevented by the use of either, or both of the simple gadgets that my friend Walter had probably never even heard of, back then!