Robert McNeil: The end of my footy career came not with a bang, but with a whimper

I WANT to speak to you this week about the bump on my toe. Do not be alarmed. There is more to my toe than meets the eye.

Let the page go all swirly as I take you back nine months, to the birth of this bump. I was coming down the stairs in ma hoose. Normally, this is something I accomplish with ease. I rarely need to psych myself up or take a couple of practice runs on the top two stairs, like many people do. I just get on with it, plunging downwards in a controlled manner.

However, on this occasion, I was distracted. Not only that, but I was still wearing my reading glasses. These fiendish binoculars, as regular readers know, are always trying to kill me. Usually, their method is to go missing when I need them urgently – say, when I am impelled to read a poem or Indian takeaway menu.

Their aim is to bring on a heart attack or stroke, and I'd be interested to know the statistics about how many people have been killed by trying to find their reading glasses. Would it exceed the number killed trying to open the impenetrable packaging on a packet of biscuits?

The other way that reading glasses try to kill you is by staying on your face after you have stopped reading. This does not matter if you remain still. But if you move – and most of us do at some point – then you are inviting danger. On this occasion, nine months ago, I was dawdling doon the stairs in a dwam, with the specs still oan ma coupon. The world was a blur, but so was my mind, and I thought little of it. However, at the bottom of the staircase, I tried to step on to a stair that wasn't there, and my toe collided head-first, as it were, with the ground.

The pain was agonising but, funnily enough, it soon subsided and I thought nothing more of it, other than holding the glasses at arm's length and threatening them with a good kicking. It's at times like these that someone usually comes through the door, and this occasion was no exception. The Burd – for it was she – just looked at me and sighed as I addressed my spectacles in an intemperate manner.

Some time later, a big bump appeared on my toe, and it has never gone away. It's subject to periodic bouts of pain and has prematurely brought my five-a-side football career to a close, which is a great sadness to me. I had the toe X-rayed, but doctors say there is nothing they can do. A bit has chipped off the bone, which would better have suffered a straight fracture or break, since at least then it could have healed up. Instead, the chipped-off bit has become permanently detached. It is, of course, absurd that modern medical science cannot get rid of a toe-lump, but I would not let them operate anyway, as I don't want to die of germs.

At the surgery, I could see tears in the eyes of the medical staff. But, to me, it was no laughing matter. I loved playing football, and seemed to get better with age. I'd often wondered how my career would end: a dirty tackle; disillusion with all the cheating; a sudden Gestalt feeling that kicking a ba' aboot was a daft pursuit.

I never thought it would end with a toe stubbed on the stairs of ma ain hoose. Funnily enough, the bump never affected my badminton but, at the time of writing, I have crutches by my side, as I have ripped a calf muscle, after lunging heroically in pursuit of the feathery shuttlecock. What fools sport makes of us all. Now I can't do my pilates or tai chi, gentler activities that generate inner strength while doing nothing to stop you getting fat.

I can't go to the gym either, but am stood sat sitting here (as Nellie Pledge used to say) with a big bump on my toe and my lower leg bruised and swollen.

It's enough to turn a man to drink, though I don't even have that solace, as I already turned to drink years ago. I could batter the bump with a mallet. I could try having it massaged away. But nothing will shift it. I'm stuck with my bump. It's a part of me, as much as my heid or the mysterious region behind the knee.

Perhaps the bump has been sent as a warning (wall-shaking, unearthly voice: "Cease playing footer, Rab, for I, Jehovah the Merciless, have other plans for you"). Whatever the case, it won't go away. I am looking at it now. It just sits there. Waiting.