The topic this week is bruises. And scabs and scars and general bumps. Now, the boyfriend says I’m a Tomboy, but I think I’m particularly unfortunate. When will there be a day when I stop having scabby knees and scars everywhere and can join this race of women who can wear tights more than once and buy shoes based on their design as opposed to their level of practicality for jumping fences?

Number one incident that has given me bruises this week. Said bruises are on my back and arse and I have a bit of a sore wrist. I was stupid enough to lock myself out at the weekend in between a Bikram session and meeting some actors to rehearse them for a shoot. So there I am in my sweat drenched leggings, close to tears on my doorstep when I realise I’ve left the bathroom window unlocked. Excellent. I’ll knock on the neighbours’ door. No reply. One door down a man answers looking a bit rough (but probably not as rough as me given that I’ve just spent an hour and a half on one leg in 42 degree heat). ‘Hi! I’m your next door neighbour but one. Erm…excuse the sweat! Well I was wondering if, well you see I’ve locked myself out and, well, is there any way you could let me through your house to your garden so I can try and see if I can get into my garden to see if I can break in through the bathroom window which I think I may have, probably rather dangerously but I don’t normally do it, don’t worry, I’m sure you’re not, left unlocked?!’. He stands stunned. ‘So if I could just get through?’. ‘Er, well the house is quite messy.’ ‘Oh. Right. Well I promise I won’t look, but I do really need to get in and both my flatmates are on tour and I can’t get the landlady. Please?!’. ‘Er, yea, sure, just don’t look.’ I close my eyes to just a slit and tiptoe through the poor hungover not really my neighbour guy’s house. We get out the back and I realise the scale of the problem. Two fences have to be scaled, and that’s before I tackle the window. Oh well, at least I am in my sports gear. I begin to scramble over the first fence then the second. Quite smug with my progress I turn to look at the non-neighbour who has got a stepladder and is hopping deftly over the fences that way. Annoying. He could have told me. Anyway, by the time he reaches me I am already halfway through the window. Thin half. Face down, legs out. He puts the ladder down underneath me and gets onto the first step. I narrowly miss kicking him in the face. ‘Erm if you could just grab my (sweaty) legs and push, I might just be able to fit through, and slide nicely into the bath without cracking my head open. He grabs my legs and pushes. Poor bloke. My bum’s too big but he doesn’t want to state the obvious. It’s like a great big elephant at the top of the ladder. ‘Maybe you should try it on your back?’ he suggests. I think he means that the bum would be squished by the gravity of my spine and more likely to squeeze through. ‘OK’. I turn over and try again. Nope, but to be honest, was trying less hard for fear of landing on head backwards. After that he went off to get some tools and came back and managed to break the window so that it opened a bit more and I was able to tumble in, head-first, to the space between the sink and the bath. ‘Thanks so much!’. I wave at him from the floor, unable to get up at this point. He has already run away in fear. I will leave a present for him (didn’t catch his name) next time I pass, but I would like to know how I could have avoided those particular bruises…what do elegant women do when locked out? What if I had been wearing tights?

Secondly I have recently acquired an iPhone. This is because I need to check personal emails at work and the company computer blocks them. I am a busy woman and used to multi tasking, in particular multitasking of the walking and texting at the same time variety. So you can imagine my chagrin when I discover that you can’t feel your way round an iPhone key pad – you actually have to look at it. So I give it a go on the way to the boyfriend’s from tescos. Inevitably, about two minutes in I hit a lamp post. With my toe, knee and head. I know, I’m nothing if not thorough. Sodding thing, feel like suing Apple. I get back up to the boyfriends flat and find that my toe has exploded and I am bleeding all over his floor. Also my knee has an egg shaped bruise on it. Fairly happy though as head seems to remain undamaged. Two days later my head scar (from being unfortunately stabbed on the way home a couple of years ago) has flared up Harry-Potter style. I can only accredit that to the iPhone incident. An injury hatrick. That is unless my Portuguese nemesis who stabbed me in the first place is in the near vicinity. Unlikely but possible.

My life is full of such events (getting chased by a prize fighting bull whilst on a horse in Ecuador, falling in a river on a night-hike in Turkey and losing a shoe, the list goes on). I would like to publicly pledge to reduce them significantly and change my fight or flight style wardrobe accordingly to that of a woman who does not suffer such incidents. I will stop my new hobby, ‘anatomy wars’ (a new type of wrestling which serves to equalise the sexes by using unusually pointy parts of the body as weapons), but in return I would like to put it out into the ether that it’s time these things stopped happening to me – I will even nominate a potential receiver of unfortunate events if that helps.