What's that you say Skip? Bunky's in trouble?

When you’re 47-years-old unique experiences are few and far between.

If you find one it tends to be expensive, borderline illegal, morally dubious or even all three.

That’s where working with youngsters 20 years your junior can help. Yesterday, I was afforded a unique experience by my colleagues. It was not one I would ever have gone out of my way to undertake, nor would I have even considered it.

Succinctly, I was shut in a skip. It’s not exactly on a par with the trauma of Natascha Kampusch but for somebody whose bad ankle wouldn’t take the drop from a yard up, it might have proved emotionally distressing – at least until the next cup of coffee arrived.

In short, I foolishly offered to help my colleague Lee – on whom there is now a fatwa – move a tired old filing cabinet into the skip, which, being of an old manufacture, has the advantage of a drop-down end.

While Lee walked around the outside of the skip holding up his end of the tired old cabinet, this tired old hack walked into the skip with the other end to facilitate a correct positioning of the superfluous jetsam.

No sooner had the young rapscallion dropped his end than he had run around to the back of the skip and raised the ‘drawbridge’ thingy leaving yours truly standing in a skip, and facing the daunting prospect of a leap from a yard up on to fragile ankles and a dodgy Achilles.

As I toiled in vain to work out the highly sophisticated locking system on such a working-class implement, my other young colleague Henry Alliss emerged and took a picture of me in the midst of my suffering.

And, as both guys knew I was currently working my way through a box set of the teenage angst comedy The Inbetweeners, Alliss turned on his heels while quipping “Ha! Skip-w***er!”

I expect better from somebody whose father and grandfather graced the Ryder Cup…

Note the sophisticated locking mechanism on the skip - it wholly defeated me

(pic courtesy of Henry "Is that your printing finished or mine?" Alliss)

I even earned a temporary new nickname: Skippy. What’s more, young Alliss then produced a colour copy of the picture for the office wall, the only redeeming feature being that it gave me the air of a confident Special Forces commander about to leap from a landing craft on to Omaha beach.

Whereas the reality is, unlike those brave souls, I would never have had the courage to even get in a landing craft, let alone jump out of one while under a barrage of fire from an enemy intent on turning me into a colander.

Particularly not on these ankles…