Chopping wood in the dark
Never ever do this while drunk in the cold and dark with a small handaxe.

You will chop wood. You will also remove the tip of the middle finger on your left hand to the first joint. You will think you've just caught your finger.

You will then go indoors to run some cold water over your smarting finger only to find that the end is actually missing.

At this point, it helps if you call the missus and the neighbours to go looking for it in the snow with torches while you phone the ambulance. It won't, of course, be found. So you'll have go to hospital and sit in casualty for two hours until they stitch up the skin over the joint, having first tidied up the jagged end of bone with what looks like a pair of tin-snips.

The next day when the cat finds the missing fingertip and has to be forced to part with it by your better half who then puts it in a matchbox, you will feel a bit queasy. Burying it in the garden will not ease this. The worse bit will be the removing of the stitches from within the big scab covering the end of your finger by a bloke with a scalpel the following week.

Length? Shorter than the fingers either side now like :-)
(Gwawdiwr, Thu 20 Dec 2007, 23:18, Reply)