I can’t remember the first time that playing the piano started to hurt my back. Just that all of a sudden, it hurt, and it has hurt ever since. The reasons are clear enough. Poor posture, lack of consistent exercise, potentially dodgy genes, and undoubtedly too much time sat at a desk working, mixing music, or composing angry emails and then deleting them without sending. And to add insult to injury, it seems that my memory, like my back, is also going.

According to my physio, my body now behaves as though my back is permanently on the verge of severe trauma. Even though it isn’t. I’ve had so many back issues over the past decade that the slightest hint of excess tension instantly causes all of my muscles to spasm, rendering me nauseous and immobile. It’s my body’s way of saying “FREEZE!”, minus the “Put your hands up in the air where I can see them.” Which is just as well really, as I’d almost certainly fail to comply with such an instruction.

Generally speaking, I can live with this inconvenience. Lifting heavy objects is problematic. 18 holes of golf practically cripples me. These are minor quibbles. But it would be nice to find a way around the piano issue. It must be a stool thing. Stools and benches – anything that doesn’t have a back of its own. Playing the drums also hurts, although, as it turns out, I’m so unfit that I can barely last more than 15 minutes on the instrument before I need to go and douse myself in ice cold water.

Phil Collins hasn’t been able to play the drums or the piano since injuring a vertebrae in his upper neck on the 2007 Genesis tour. I gather that it was a disaster waiting to happen due to his basic playing position, which meant that excessive pressure was applied to his spinal cord every time he struck up a beat. The great man had surgery to repair the damage, but this only resulted in him losing feeling in his fingers and hands, and that was that – playing career over. He probably can’t dance either.

Am I destined to follow in Phil’s footsteps? I can already see my future physical calamities looming on the horizon. Things will get worse, and so I should perhaps take action now to protect myself further down the line. But by the same token, life is so very fleeting, and there is much to be said for taking full advantage of my present tense opportunities while they remain present and opportune. Right now I can still play the piano and the drums, therefore I should play them?

Herein lies the challenge so many of us face: to reconcile the need to keep paying into our pensions, while simultaneously living every day as though it’s our last.

To give up stool-sitting (and golf) now in the hope of preserving essential bodily functions, or to get on-stage at the next local jam night and terrify the crowd with a full-blooded Collins medley. Can you guess where my inclination lies?