Agility on one leg

Once, some years ago, I was in Frankfurt for a meeting. The meeting was a late one -6pm, late for the average German working day then - and when I walked into their office, sure enough nearly everyone seemed to have left for the day. Nobody was at reception and it was a few minutes before a woman happened upon me and directed me to their meeting room. I sat there for a good 15 minutes, and just as I began to wonder whether I was the only person who knew about this meeting, there was a click at the door. Someone had locked it. I was locked in a strange room in an unfamiliar building in a foreign country. Everyone had gone home. Strangely I didn't panic. I spoke German, knew the number of Emergency Services and knew what street I was in. I couldn't quite believe I was in this situation, and anyone who has read my post about the puking dog will have gathered by now that I attract them like a magnet, so rather than make myself the laughing stock of the Frankfurt Fire Brigade, I decided to help myself. I looked around the room. There was a window, and I was on the ground floor. Hooray. I had a plan. I pulled up the window, got a chair, climbed on it, took my kitten heels off and threw them outside, hitched up my pencil skirt, and climbed clumsily out. The pencil skirt was so constraining that I couldn't balance the foot that had found freedom sufficiently securely on the outside sill, and I crashed ingloriously into a bush. No matter, I was free, and more importantly, nobody had had to rescue me. Apart from a personal resolution never, ever to wear a pencil skirt again, I was pretty damn proud of myself. As I stared up at my highest kitchen cupboard shelf this morning, I thought of this episode in my two-legged life with not inconsiderable nostalgia. I needed to reach something on that shelf and with one leg in a surgical boot it wasn't going to happen. Or was it? Months of hobbling on crutches and I have Popeye arms. Time to make a virtue of them. I heave myself on to the kitchen surface, grab a crutch and using the cuff as a claw, pull the marshmallows for which I have such desperate need, from their dusty home. They drop satisfyingly into my hand. Result. I may not be in kitten heels and a tight skirt, but baby, ingenuity is as ninja a skill as agility.