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 titled “Rotator cuff disease in humans and apes: a palaeopathological and evolutionary perspective on shoulder pathology”. I’ve rarely felt so connected with my ancestors, so human, and indeed so ape-like. In an instant my shoulder pain became easier to bear, as I felt at one with a caveman wincing as he reached up to apply the finishing touches to some wall art.

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Source: Guardian Science