Climbing inside a gym bag isn’t erotic or lethal – believe me, I’ve tried

Can I ask a small favour of you? Nothing too onerous, just something you might usefully store away at the back of your memory.

Can I ask a small favour of you? Nothing too onerous, just something you might usefully store away at the back of your memory. It is this: if I am ever found dead, padlocked inside a sports hold-all and dumped in the bath and the police — having investigated events ineffectually for a week or more — tell you I did it all myself as part of an auto-erotic experiment which went horribly wrong, don’t believe them. However fervent the rozzers might seem in their belief, no matter what contortionist, escapologist or magician they employ to prove that it can be done, please trust me on this: I did not do it, someone else did it to me. Probably Diane Abbott, although you would need to prove that point.

Having read the morning papers and become unaccountably curious, I tried to climb inside a hold-all last night in the expectation of being consumed by an erotic miasma, and I wrenched my left knee out of its socket. The only bits of me I could get in the hold-all were my legs and 16 per cent of my backside. As I tried to get comfortable there were ominous noises of things tearing, a clean and sharp rip as the fabric of the bag swiftly separated itself from the zip and then a wet, guttural exclamation, like you get when you tear off the leg of a fresh-from-the-oven roast chicken, as my anterior cruciate ligament separated itself from my knee. I howled. My five-year-old daughter appeared in the doorway. ‘Why are you sitting in that bag and crying, daddy?’ she asked.