Why take the easy option? Why not just make things difficult for the hell of it? I was given a unicycle as a Christmas present in 2004 and I spent the next year and a half falling off it. One evening I was in the living room and took a rather unappealing fall which concluded in me binning a pair of trousers.

It's a shame because I really liked those trousers.

After 18 months of falling about it just seemed to click and in the space of six months I was using my unibike to get anywhere I wanted to. I can now quite happily go for three hour trips (although I'll be a little tired afterwards).

Unicycling is fantastic fun and obviously great for developing a sense of balance. It also seems to be a pretty good way of keeping fit - so I really would recommend it!

7th February 2007 - oops

Yesterday I broke my little finger in my right hand. It's not a serious break but it is broken. As you can probably guess I did this whilst unicycling. The thing is that I wasn't doing anything particularly adventurous or out of the ordinary - I was just riding to my lecture when the left peddle caught in a fence and I was catapulted towards a lamp post. It's just unfortunate that one finger went one way whilst my body went another.

At the time it didn't hurt that much, so I got back on my unicycle and went to my lecture. It soon became apparent that something wasn't right when I found it difficult to write my notes. After the lecture I took myself to hospital where it transpired that I'd broken my little finger just above the knuckle (i.e. on the back of my palm). After spending the night in hospital, the doctors decided that they didn't want to operate and so I was discharged after having toast for breakfast. I walked home.

I'm determined to learn at least two things from this little episode. Firstly, I think it's incredibly important to smile when you go into hospital; my great Aunty Margaret always pointed out that it takes less muscles to smile than frown and I think she was on to something. Secondly it's important to realise that everything really does have an associated risk.

Doing something like unicycling is about recognising those risks which you're willing to accept, minimising them as much as possible and finally accepting that, given enough chances, one day you will break your hand. Equally as much as I'm not going to stop driving a car, this doesn't mean I'm going to stop unicycling. Hopefully next time all of my fingers will go in the same direction!

One final thought; I'm not going to be able to do much in the way of my usual physical activities for a while, so perhaps this is an opportunity to try something new.....

2nd February 2007 - What did you do for lunch?

I've been able to get around town for a while now. But I've not really been pushing my unicycling much recently. So in my lunch break I decided to go out and see what I could find. An hour later and this was the result;

Please note; some firewalls and pop up blockers may prevent you from seeing this video.

A big thank you for the highly professional Sam Booth and his photography capabilities.