Lethal Potato

I like lots of different films, for many different reasons. I can enjoy slapstick humour or foreign art house films depending on my mood or who I'm with, but guilty pleasures include popcorn action movies like Die Hard, Speed and Lethal Weapon. One of the scenes that's always stood out for me in Lethal Weapon 3 is the one where Mel Gibson and Renee Russo are comparing their battle scars- each of them shows the other a succession of increasingly gruesome scars as part of a bizarre seduction routine. It's something that's been done a few times in films- Jaws and Chasing Amy both had similar scenes, and often if film makers want to make a character edgy or dangerous, they'll give them a battle wound.  There's something mysterious, glamorous and dangerously sexy about scars, especially if they are accompanied by a tale of great bravery and excitement. According to Hollywood though, it has to be the right kind of scar (Brad Pitt in Inglourious Bastards- good, Freddie Kruger- bad).

I have a scar that was the result of a painful injury, and it has been the topic of several converstations, but unfortunately it's neither glamorous or sexy. In fact  it's about as far from that as possible. It is in a very- erm- private place, and was caused by a baked potato.

The exact circumstances of said injury are blurry in my mind, but essentially what happened was I was not very clothed (i.e naked) when removing a baked potato from the oven one evening and it all went a bit wrong. The most likely reason for my nakedness was that I was having a bath (I spend so much time in the bath I'm almost certainly half-mermaid) and lost track of time while listening to music from beneath a face pack, then couldn't find a towel when I realised dinner was burning. Whatever the exact chain of events, I remember there was smoke, and panic, and I opened the oven door to find a shrivelled black thing that once resembled a potato smouldering on the bottom shelf of the cooker.

Once I'd got over the initial backdraft, I reached for the nearest thing i could find (a thin, entirely unsuitable tea towel) and took the tray out. At this point the degree of the unsuitability of this tea towel became apparent-  I may as well have just took the thing out with my bare hands as I burnt my fingers, did a bit of obligatory shouty swearing, and dropped the tin on the floor. Somehow, through some strange act of physics that I'll never understand, the potato didn't stay put on the floor but instead bounced up and hit me, full on, in what would be most politely described as the "lady bits".

Few things in life can compare to the pain of being pelted in the most sensitive or areas with something that has just come out of a 200C oven. Clearly, you can't just put it under the tap so I ended up throwing cold water at myself until I'd stopped screaming and shouting inventive swearwords. A sensible person would have probably gone to A and E but 1) it was too embarrassing and 2) I'm not sensible, so dealt with it all myself and after a few days was able to walk without too much pain - although tight jeans were not an option for a good few weeks.

It would certainly take a pretty talented film director to make this incident appear in any way mysterious or seductive. And unsurprisingly, this particular blog entry will remain photo free.