You know, of all the classic children’s TV moments to play out in real life, I really would have preferred not to reenact the hilarious tragic blinding of PJ on Byker Grove in a freak paintballing accident. I did not wind up on the floor screeching about me eyes, man, but it was ruddy close. What happened was this:

We needed to take the ammo box to the opposition’s base to win. I’d just come back into the game and came bounding down the hill like a sprightly young rhino to join Mike in doing the necessary. As we hurtled towards the base the one guy left on the opposing team set himself up to defend it, but we penned him in via the tactic of spraying paintballs in random directions and yelling incoherently, and he couldn’t get a decent shot. Then I felt my facemask starting to slip (useless crappy thing, a bit of sweating and it was like it had been greased up ready to swim the channel). I had just long enough to think “Gosh, hope I don’t get shot in the face” before one landed smack above my right eye. Naturally I fell to my knees a la Willem Dafoe in Platoon, and faintly heard an “Oh shit” from the git that pulled the trigger. Once I’d established that my eye was still in its socket and functioning correctly, the same guy said “you were bloody lucky”, which was dead wrong – I was bloody unlucky, just not quite unlucky enough to suffer some proper nastiness. If the black eye comes out as nicely as I think it will, I’ll pop a picture up.