The Knot-Master

Last night, feeling a headache coming on, I drank two bottles of water immediately before going to bed. It seemed like a good idea at the time (somehow). Of course, I woke up in the middle of the night with a desperate need for a toilet. It began very well. I flung myself out of bed, did not trip over any of the many hazards that occupy my floor (cat, shoes, this odd little raised bit, a rug that's been trying to kill me for many years but I keep it because I love it anyway), grabbed a torch so as not to wake my severely insomniac family by flicking lights on, did not fall down the stairs and die, avoided the other cat, slipped into not a single puddle of invisible lava and reached the bathroom.

That's where it all started to go wrong.

You'd have thought I'd be home free by then, but no. No, no, no. See, my grandmother believes me to be two clothes sizes bigger than I am, and consequently I had had to knot the drawstring of the pyjama pants she had bought me. When I went to bed, the knot had looked like this:

When I reached the bathroom, the knot looked like this:

I apologise for the lack of actual photos but my presence of mind at the time was not magnificent. I'm not even sure how there was that much drawstring. I feel certain somebody did this to me in my sleep. At any rate, the point is that out of a sheer pressing necessity I managed to undo this tangled monstrosity in about 3.5 seconds, despite these factors:

• Darkness
• Urgency
• Hand injury
• Seriously, that was a big knot
• Like, this big.

Which makes me wonder, have I always had this ability? I do have a lot of patience, but that was not a time for patience. Normally when I wish to untie a knot like that it takes me a very long time. Has the ability to swiftly untie knots always been there, dormant within me? Or is this just a part of that long-acknowledged fact that we always get better at things when we really have to do them? I wonder if evolution plays any part in this at all. Is there something buried deep in our primal genes that allows us to gain fast, incredible talents in our moments of need? After all, you run a lot faster when you're being chased by a lion than you do if you're just at the gym, and I've seen people running after busses at bordering on light speed. It's impressive to watch. Maybe if we were all put into urgent situations we'd discover mighty hidden talents. Not that untying knots is likely to contribute hugely to society, and I can't think of an ethically plausable situation in which someone could discover that they play piano beautifully, but we all learn something about ourselves in a crisis.