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

‘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.

After the radio show I was full of regret that I didn’t get time to ask her about another bone with which I’ve had my troubles: the coccyx. Mine has not been the same since I did some extreme cycling for Sport Relief with Alan Shearer 18 years ago. To this day, every so often if I sit wrong, I get a very nasty kind of electric shock shooting up from my derriere.

When I asked Roberts later about matters of the coccyx, she didn’t disappoint. As it happens, she, too, has had coccyx problems, damaging hers when she fell off a table on which she was dancing. Impressive. As, predictably, is her knowledge of this area. She told me the coccyx consists of tiny, fused vertebrae that finish off your vertebral column at the bottom, or rather, in the bottom. Given that this remnant of a tailbone can’t be wagged, you may wonder if there’s any point to this little pointy thing. Well, without it there would be nothing to attach the pelvic floor muscles to, at the back. And that, she said, would result in your pelvic viscera falling out, which sounds awful. So look after your coccyx, at all costs.

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist