Sue Perkins

Sue Perkins

It was the tail end of March 2018 and I was at home doing a spot of spring cleaning. It was the turn of the upstairs windows, which had acquired a notable layer of grime over the winter period. There was nothing out of the ordinary in my preparations; I placed the ladder against the wall at the top of the stairs, made it safe and then took off my clothes. I, like most people, prefer to clean naked – I find it simpler. I don’t like to smear a newly scrubbed pane of glass with a cuff or sleeve and mess up my endeavours.

I always like to start at the top and work down. Makes sense. I stretched up as high as could, reaching for the top of the frame, and it was then I lost my balance. The ladder started to sway, gently at first, then violently from side to side – and, before I knew it, I was catapulted down the stairs.

As for what happened next, I can only submit to the laws of physics. Newton’s First Law, to be precise. This states that an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. The unbalanced force was, of course, me – hurtling down the stairs. The object at rest was a hoover.

I’m sure you can imagine the discomfort involved in hitting a cleaning implement at speed, and at such an unusually acute angle too. Added to which I was naked, making my body even more vulnerable to assault.

I’m not sure if it was during the initial impact that the soft-brush attachment ended up where it did. Sadly, my memory of the event is a little hazy, due to the trauma. What I feel, is that if classical mechanics can’t explain the whole story, then the answer must be found in the world of quantum, where spontaneous movement is entirely possible. Under these conditions, once I’d hit the hoover and the flex flew into the air, the attachment would be able to find its own way into that most dark and secretive of human corners.

Anyway, I told all of this to the nice man at The Royal Free Hospital and he appeared quite satisfied with my explanation. So much so, he brought in all his colleagues to hear it, over and over again. The ward was positively heaving by the end of the evening!

I cannot thank the NHS enough. Thanks to all its dedicated physicians and carers I am now attachment-free and can get back to cleaning those windows.

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