No such thing as a confined space

I calculated my body mass index a few weeks ago. Apparently I need to lose about half a stone, or grow two inches taller. In an attempt to become fitter, I’ve begun playing badminton regularly. This is proving excellent exercise for the stomach muscles, as I repeatedly bend over to retrieve from the ground the shuttlecock which I have just failed to hit.

Thankfully, badminton is something which I enjoy, as I’m not so anxious to lose weight that exercise is an attractive enough end in itself. Although I will confess to having a fairly unrealistic concept of the scale of my body anyway. Not in terms of my weight, but simply that I too frequently fail to entertain the notion that I might not fit through a gap down the back of a desk when plugging in a printer, or sticking my arm under a couch to retrieve a runaway malteser.

When idly strolling around, I will all too often find myself wondering if I could curl up and fit into a nearby cardboard box, or get my whole body through the hole in the back of a chair, when in reality I probably couldn’t even get my head through it.

Even when the space is big enough, I seem incapable of actually remembering that my body is wider than my head. I’m probably clipping a hip or shoulder off a doorframe a good few dozen times a year. This is nature’s way of telling me I should be living in an open-plan barn, if not a vast, empty field.

One of the most frequent forms of spacial unappreciation comes when lazily trying on shirts in department stores. It isn’t that I try on items too small for me, it’s that I take them off by simply undoing the two top buttons and try to pull them over my head, an act that fails to take into account the fact that I have arms and shoulders. Rather than resulting in the swift removal of the shirt, this act simply results in it getting stuck inside-out over my face, with the collar still around my neck and both arms held in the air on either side of my head. At this point, I always seem to instincively do the same thing. I turn around.

I’m not sure exactly what this is supposed to achieve, whether I expect that I might magically change shape when facing in a different direction, but invariably it just ends with me bashing at least one arm off the wall of the cubicle, and in some instances bouncing my head off one of the clothes hooks.

The shirt gets pulled down, I undo the buttons properly; the whole process takes six times as long as this simple task of undressing should have required. And I learn nothing, doing the whole thing again at some other point in the near future. I am big, but I’m not clever.

Advertisement