Take good care of your tailbone. I didn’t – and my derriere has never been the same since | Adrian Chiles

My coccyx still hurts from an extreme cycling challenge almost two decades ago. Is there anything it’s good for? ‘Welcome to middle age. ” This is what my GP said to me 10 years ago when I asked her why I needed this pill or that. Being then just shy of 50, that hit home. Now being just shy of 60, I mutter those words to myself at least once a day. There’s a long list of aches, pains and assorted maladies about which to mutter.

High up on that list are my shoulders. Bloody agony, both of them. Picking something off a high shelf or fishing for something on the back seat of the car have had to become planned events to be undertaken only if absolutely necessary. I interviewed Prof Alice Roberts this week. A writer, broadcaster, academic, anatomist, archaeologist and sometime medical doctor, she knows her bones, and no mistake. I noted with interest that her PhD thesis was…