The bodies that we’re born with, or into, are accidents: unforeseeable chance results of genes, environment, history, time and place. We don’t choose our bodies, nor much of what happens to them. But it’s difficult to separate the fate of the body and of the self: the two are tied together in the resistance of the body’s corporeality, this material package of blood, flesh and bones, wrapped up in a human skin. We have to take our bodies with us on our journey through life, and then, when they don’t work any more, we or someone else must decide how to dispose of them: incineration, burial, recycling – the choices are much the same as for any type of rubbish.

Without one of these bodily accidents, the story of Fracture would never have happened or been written. My intact right arm couldn’t have composed the tale its reconstituted version has: I, the person hiding in the body, would never have had to confront the consequences of skeletal breakdown: the impact on my everyday life, on the relationship between self and body, on the marvellous feats unfractured arms accomplish all the time. Most of all, I wouldn’t have been impelled to think about this central paradox of people having, but not being, bodies. The nature of the connection between body, self, sensation, brain and consciousness would have stayed for me at an abstract level, as theories or opinions more or less arrogantly voiced, more or less believable.

Fracture is my attempt to make sense of what happened to me and my right arm. It’s a ‘retrospective narratization’ which takes the form it does because of my own personal history. The trade of sociological researcher – my trade – implies a certain analytic pose towards both public and private events. What can these tell us about underlying patterns of human social relations, about their successes and failures, about good recipes and bad ones? How can we pass the material of events and situations through a metaphorical sieve, chucking the detritus down the sink, and gazing carefully at the possible gems left behind? There’s a certain logic of enquiry in our trade, too: not just what happened, but how did different participants perceive what happened? What, in people’s personal biographies, might account for these perspectives?