I SUPPOSE I must count myself fortunate that there have been only two occasions in my life when I have almost passed out.

The first came a few years ago when I discovered our football team's unwashed kit in a plastic bag in the boot of my car... two weeks after we had last played.

I should have immediately posted it to Sellafield for recycling. Instead, I made the mistake of opening the bag.

The second time came last week when I walked into the lift in one of those multi-storey car parks.

Returning to my car parked a good three miles above my head - probably on its second orbit of the Earth judging by the ascent I had made in it earlier - there was no way my tired old body could have handled such an epic upward journey via the stairs.

But I knew I had made a mistake when I discovered that the lift was actually working.

Multi-storey car park lifts never actually function unless there is something dreadfully wrong within.

Indeed, it would not surprise me to find that Osama bin Laden is hiding out in one of them.

Look in any English As A Foreign Language Thesaurus under the word 'lift' and it will say 'Out Of Order'.

When the doors opened, I didn't have to enter to know that something terrible had been deposited inside.

The smell probably would have felled a moose with a stinking cold standing downwind somewhere in the frozen wastes of Alaska.

So I walked up the stairs, wondering whether I could get away with sending samples of the noxious substance to the car park's owners... preferably in a neatly-wrapped jack-in-a-box.

First published: October 18