The doctors ordered three days of ‘cognitive rest’. Cognitive what?

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger,” legendary comic and producer Mel Brooks famously said. “Comedy,” he added, “is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

What about a door falling on your head? I ask because that’s what happened to me last weekend.

It was one of those house-out-of-a-box beach rentals where the screen door to the deck never slid quite right and, eventually, having been adjusted imperfectly, fell completely off its rails. Alcohol wasn’t involved. There was just a door, some kids drawing with chalk – thankfully positioned clear of the door’s rapid downwards trajectory – and me.

The door was fine, though its collision with the back of my head was enough to dent its metal frame – a fact in which I took an odd pride. I was fine, too, though mildly concussed.

But the shock was real – as were the doctors’ orders for something called “cognitive rest”. Not having come across this concept before, I found it surprisingly difficult to pull off.

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I was ordered to lie in a darkened room for 72 hours and, crucially, not to look at any screens. Even books were off-limits while my brain undertook the impossibly complex task of rewiring itself.

Supine under a whirring ceiling fan and thankful to have bested death, if not its door, I let my brain take to rifling through filing cabinets it hadn’t touched in decades. This wasn’t my life flashing before my eyes. Instead, it was a slow-motion selection of its most under-appreciated chapters, recalled with unprecedented clarity by a mind permitted, for once, to wander aimlessly.

I spent my first evening of bed rest lingering on year 7, a time of protractors and PE shorts and a field trip to Jenolan Caves. I recalled the thrill of owning a scientific calculator and the terror of wielding it during an end-of-term test.