It’s a truth universally acknowledged that crap things in your life come in threes.

For example, a few weeks ago, my step-mother’s best friend died, the next day a dear friend of mine’s sister died and then on the third day I was told I needed to magically come up with thousands of dollars (perhaps out of my bum) to settle a property purchase which was money I just didn’t have for a contract I had no legal way of which to get out.

Obviously the first two events were much worse than the third one, which actually felt much less crap than it should have been to me because of the preceding two days of bad news. Perspective is always a very good thing.

Which brings me, using a very inelegant transition, to my desire for new less accident-prone friends. You see, shortly after the events outlined above, one of friends broke her knee-cap – which many of you read about here a couple of weeks ago.

And not long after her “bitumen knee-date”, another friend was evacuated from her unit complex because of a huge fire in an apartment four floors above her own. While her and her partner’s place was unscathed, the whole block is rooted – thanks to a candle and possibly a curtain mating with catastrophic results – and they are technically homeless for nine months.

While I was having lunch with aforementioned friend on Sunday, and joking about how I had one invalid and one homeless friend, another one was unknowingly about to become the final member of this tragic trio. But in an episode that can only be described as “you really can’t make this shit up” she nearly ended up a paraplegic from doing a nudie run… sober on a Sunday afternoon.

Sometimes you hurt yourself doing something spectacularly mundane because you’re thinking about what to have for dinner or you’re fantasising about that hot bloke in your Latin dance class. Or perhaps you’re trying to do too many things at once or at the last minute and you end up falling on your face, or on your bum in the nude. This last example is what happened to my friend on Sunday. To protect her dignity let’s call her, ah, Marina.

A mother of three, and wife, and part-time employee and uni student, she was spending Sunday studying for an exam she was due to sit the very next day. Strangely she was looking forward to it so the following events can in no way be attributed to the actions of a study-crazed lunatic doing anything humanly possible to get out of the horror that is exam-time.

No, instead of thinking up such an elaborate plot, she decided in the midst of studying, and with very little foresight I might add, that since there were dark colours in the washing machine that she should also throw in her pyjama bottoms – which she also just happened to be wearing at the time (this is a turning point in the plot by the way).

After having such an obviously brilliant light-bulb moment, into the laundry she sauntered where she stripped off her PJ pants and threw them into the wash. But it was also at that very moment that she realised that without her PJs she was naked from the waist down and her three children were blocking the path via the lounge-room between the laundry and her bedroom.

She didn’t think to call out to her husband to bring her some undies, nor did she ask the kids to remove themselves to another room, no, she decided that the best call to action was to start running backwards towards her room while also stretching her shirt over her girlie bits so as to not frighten the children. Alas this was a very bad idea.

Within less than two metres, her Olympic-like speed meant she literally fell arse over tits and landed with an almighty crack on the floor. The force of the impact was such that she crushed one of her vertebrae to 50 per cent of its previous size.That was the cracking sound. She is shorter today than she was on Saturday, which is a major bummer (sorry for the bad pun) because she was a little vertically-challenged to start off with. We can laugh about it now (kind of) but she really was just a few millimetres from never walking again and that’s not bloody funny at all.

I spent the day with her on Tuesday and the drugs she is on made her eyes roll back in her head and slur her words. I was a little jealous I must say. I also opined that it was about time someone else but me was off their head on a Tuesday morning. Being a good girlfriend, I also prescribed watching the stripper movie Magic Mike on the telly because if half-naked, gorgeous blokes don’t cheer you up in such circumstances, what will eh?

She is definitely number three in my latest triangle of trouble. But thinking about it just now, maybe I don’t actually want less accident-prone friends after all. In fact, I think they are all perfect just as they are because not only are they are all lovely, slightly-crazy individuals, they also give me loads of fantastic stuff to write about.