How my friend suffered the smallest construction injury I know of

As a personal injury compensation worker, most of the construction injury I read about is to do with the building sites for tower blocks where people face falling scaffolding, unmanoeuvrable forklift trucks and various chemical threats, among others, if the health and safety rules are not well followed.

So in some ways it's nice to have an email arrive from a friend who complains about the 'construction injury' he received after stepping on his small son's lego blocks in the dark, not realising he'd wandered into the building site for the most inventive lunar base the boy had yet embarked upon. You don't, of course, want to harm their creativity, he said, but he'd wanted to make a joke about being 'hopping mad' and thought I'd be the person most likely to appreciate it.

Sad to say, but he was right; I am a sucker for a good pun. And, in addition to his joke, I found myself thinking about the other ways you might be able to suffer injury at the hands of construction toys.

Naturally, I remember building my own extendable punching thingy out of a sequence of connected technic Lego crosses; it seems to be one of those things that lots of people build (although sometimes the same mechanism is used for practical purposes, like lifting cherry-pickers). But that's nothing compared to the ingenuity on YouTube, where construction videos include semi-automatic guns and an enormous trebuchet, taller than the man demonstrating it.

The friend with the sore foot above will not thank me, of course, if the son reads this, but surely a 9-year-old's more likely to discover them by surfing YouTube directly than by browsing a compensation claim website? (Hopefully that's me forgiven)

As if to prove my dad's claim about Meccano being a toy that's morally better for you, the YouTube clips I can find involve gear-boxes, marble runs and a functioning orrery - a model of the solar system that the maker claims represents the relative years of the planets almost exactly. No-one seems to be trying to cause personal injury to their toys with neatly bolted weaponry.

It is possible, of course, that he was just jealous of not having had Lego as a child. Similarly, I look at what this nine-year-old has in his crate - space pirates? Big laser cables? Golden visors? I could have used those very happily in my construction projects all those years ago.

What they don't have, of course, is 1/60 scale health and safety regulations to cover those tiny building sites, which is why I have a grumpy and sore-footed friend with a 1/60 scale construction injury.

Can I claim?