From the sublime to the ridiculous…
So last week, then, after publishing my ‘woe is me’ blog post, feeling sorry for myself, hating everyone (not YOU obviously) and wanting desperately to curl back under the covers, I decided that a walk down the boat road was in order. Fresh air, I decided, would blow the cobwebs away.
The two, brand new baby calves were right by the gate. Obviously, as is my luck at the moment, this was the day I’d decided to come out without my camera. In fact, as I discovered when I patted my pockets for a second time… something else was missing too.
My keys.
Shiiiiit.
As I walked back up to the house, I wished, hoped and prayed (sorry, Mother) that I’d left the back door open, but even as I tried the handle, I knew what I would discover.
Locked.
I knocked next door and lovely Miss D and I sat and had a cup of tea as we decided what to do, and also agreed that maybe not keeping spare keys to each other’s houses wasn’t our most epic idea. As luck would have it, D chose this particular moment to walk back into the house, home early from work.
‘I’m sure one of these is yours’, he muttered as he grabbed a big handful of keys off his key/peggy/hanger thing – what ARE they called? And we walked back to English Towers, feeling optimistic. Our optimism soon started to fail after every key had been tried in every door about three times. We did, however, notice that the bathroom window was slightly open. The upstairs bathroom window. The really high bathroom window, upstairs.
D grabbed the ladder from the garage (it’s not my ladder, but Poppy’s Dad helpfully left it behind last time he mended my gutter) and he stood at the bottom, averting his gaze from my fetching baggy tracky bottomed-bottom as I teetered up the ladder, emitting small, worried squeaks as I climbed higher…
‘You are holding the ladder tight, aren’t you?’
‘*sigh* yeeeessss.’
The small window, happily, was open. It was just a case of posting myself through this 1′ x 3′ hole with as much dignity as I could muster. Well, I mustered none. I posted my upper body through the hole, squealing a bit louder as my bra strap caught through my shirt on the catch of the window. I was then half-way through, teetering as my waist caught on the window and my legs flailed in the air.
‘Pull yourself through!’, called D helpfully
‘I’m trying! But I can’t grab onto anything’, I wailed…
By this time, my hands were flat on the toilet seat and the window frame was painfully embedding itself into my upper thighs. All the blood was rushing to my head. It’s years since I did a handstand.
‘OWWWWW! That bloody hurts!’, I yelled…
‘Go in backwards!’, was the helpful response.
Fighting the temptation to tell my helpful neighbour what I thought of his coaching, whilst simultaneously sweeping the entire contents of my bathroom windowsill onto the floor with my arse, I changed orientation so that I was now facing the ceiling, and was hanging from the window by the backs of my knees.
D seemed to be having a bit of a coughing fit now and was no help at all so I let my back move slowly down the cystern and rested my neck and shoulders onto the toilet seat, then did a rather awkward backward roll into the room. D’s cough was getting worse, so by the time I got downstairs and opened the back door, he was bent double, face red and looking like he was going to expire. I inspected him for signs of hilarity, and finding none, thanked him for rescuing a damsel in distress, bestowing upon him the spare key so this can NEVER EVER happen again.
I’m a bit of a big poof at the best of times and I bruise like a peach. This morning I am black and blue. The fronts of my thighs are a fetching purple and the backs of my knees are red and sore. Seriously, I even have bruises on my ankles.
Oh the embarrassment. Still, I’m sure I can trust him not to tell anyone… especially the bit when my bottom was stuck out of the window and my legs were waving jauntily in the air…
As he went off down the drive, though I swear his shoulders were shaking a bit.
Check out my bruise, Ma!! I did think at one stage, mid-window, that I’d have to be rescued… can you imagine? The shame!
She gave me the wrong key. Nice one Mother. My parents would sleep through a hurricane so we woke all the (new) neighbours by banging on the window, door & anything else we could think of. Calls to both mobiles went unanswered, so we had to scale a very large side fence with a very locked gate & eventually got into the back garden where I screeched through my parent’s open bedroom window for 5 minutes until my Mum woke up & asked me why I didn’t use my key!!!
She did something equally epic one night – cue me & Hubs pushing a wheelie bin over to their en-suite window, me getting through the top pane, sending eveything flying to the tiled floor, walking PAST MY PARENTS to let Hubs in & they never woke up. I despair!!!
Could picture the scene so clearly, you painted it so well. The picture of the house helped too… hahahaha
Glad you managed to get in!