For the first time since passing my test over 40 years ago I have been banned from driving. Sort of. I’m still not clear whether I was technically allowed to drive, but in the event the legalities were really neither here nor there: I couldn’t drive and that was the end of it. My crime? To try to stop my dog running into the road by grabbing him around the collar, for which efforts I was rewarded with a finger so badly broken it required me to be out cold on an operating table for over two hours while one of the country’s most eminent hand surgeons performed the medical equivalent of a full body-off restoration of the inside of the offending digit. This resulted in me being in a cast from the elbow south and this self-imposed ban.