Perched like a burglar, I reached out a foot to the chair-back I had used to climb up. Why had I positioned it away from the rear wall of the kitchen, widening the gap I now had to span? Even with only a little weight on it, the chair-back flexed unpleasantly. But I had another problem. My other leg, still on the roof, was oddly wedged, knee bent at a harsh angle, with none of the slack I needed to swing it round and down to the chair. I tried taking more weight through my arms, hooking my elbows over the wall, but this just spread the discomfort to other parts of my body, and caused cold water to seep into my armpits.

Whatever the way forward, I had reached the point of no return – I didn’t have the strength to heave myself back up again. I started trying to inch my leg off the glass, finding that my biggest obstacle was the plastic gutter at the edge of the roof – I couldn’t lift my leg over it, and I didn’t like the odds of it taking much weight.

Frustration flared up in me. All the softly-softly approach had achieved was to contort me into this ridiculous position. One strong, swift movement was needed: push up with the arms as hard and as far as possible, swing out the trapped leg, and bring it down to the seat of the chair. Up, and down. And dismount.

Not quite one movement, as it happened. An assortment of movements, mostly not deliberate, mostly graceless, mostly downwards.

My foot, as expected, caught on the gutter, which sloshed a cold soup of decomposed leaves. Panicking, I tried to pull myself up on the wall, but this action instead led to me putting a lot more weight on the back of the chair. The chair slipped, bending out from under me. My arms slipped too, moving from an uncomfortable position to an intolerable one, with my face now pressed up against the top of the wall. My panic went into its second act, developing its themes with gusto. The gutter pinged away from the roof with a great arc of slimy water, and my arms lost their struggle with gravity. I fell the rest of the way – not a straight, hard, bone-snapping fall, but one of those falls that takes a surprisingly long time, in instalments, through varied terrain, with a lot of scraping contact along the way. My crotch and the inside of my right leg had a long involvement with the chair, my face and right arm remained in close communication with the wall, my left hip crunched against the glass wall of the kitchen, my left foot – eventually, after much time – landed in the water-filled planter, which tripped me, sending me all the way down to the patio.