– “Mum, why do you always have a measuring tape in your pocket? And why do you have so many of them”

– “Well, my darling: when you’re building a house, getting the measurements right is sort of important.”

I looked at my daughter over my glasses.

– “And they’re like these. Best to have one in every room. In case I need them.”

– “What, for emergency measuring?!” 

– “Ha ha! Yes, I’m planning stuff and looking at ideas and knowing whether something will fit is crucial. You’ll learn this one day when you have a home of your own.”

She did of course. It was me who did not learn this and got myself into a mess. Out of obstinacy and a desire to make my nest beautiful, I like to think. But in reality stupidity. And impatience. And not doing what I spent my professional life telling others to do.

Some years ago I decided to acquire some rose supports. My rose bushes – a circle of three Schiaparelli pink scented roses, whose colour and perfume are saying, like a 1930’s movie star, “Darlings, I know I’m stunning!” – were growing tall and wide. The plastic ones in garden centres are too feeble. Large solid cast iron ones were the answer. I rang the supplier and placed my order, including their largest. 

“You will make sure that you can get it into the garden, won’t you?” he warned me. “Previous customers have had problems.” 

“Yes, yes of course” I said, thinking about the double doors into the conservatory, the sofa in there and the garden furniture taken through it. What’s an iron spiral consisting mostly of air compared to that!

Delivery day: three rose supports arrived. That’s when I realised that what needed to be more measured was me. The largest one was too big to go through the front door. Never mind. It could be manoeuvred through the bay window – though only a fool or a gardening fanatic (ie me) would open the front sash window all the way up in the middle of a howling gale.  Lifting a 1.2 metre high cast iron object is not the work of a moment either, I can tell you. Once in, I moved it into the corridor. Ah! The one place I had not measured. It was 80 centimetres wide. As was the only door opening into the garden. The support was 5 centimetres wider.

– “Oh, for God’s sake! There must be a way to get this through!”

Angles, I thought. If I angle it in some way, that’ll do it. I’ll finally have found a practical use for the hypotenuse. No. I hadn’t.

– “Look, would it bloody kill you to squeeze yourself a little and just bloody well co-operate! Just go through, damn you!”

Half an hour of valiant, repeated and determined efforts to make 85 go into 80 proved only that this is impossible. The conservatory double doors and garden beyond them might as well have been a desert mirage. I was certainly hot and thirsty enough by now.

Briefly, I contemplated having a cast iron objet d’art in the centre of the living room – as a sort of fire pit for ditzy housewives, possibly. But then I decided to send it back. So I had to manoeuvre it back out of the front window. At this point, small children and their parents passing in the street as they went home from school must have been wondering what a sweaty, sweary woman (“fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckety-fuck, oh for fuck’s sake!” on repeat, ever more loudly) was doing lunging around with what looked like a cast iron offensive weapon stuck in the front window. Possibly some new form of burglary technique?

What I didn’t realise was that in opening the window all the way up, I had managed to jam it open. Would it shut? Would it buggery! More swearing and sweating and, by now, shouting.  People were crossing the street. A few may even have been crossing themselves. Why were these damn objects being so bloody inanimate and unhelpful? Would it have killed them to just do what they were told? Their deliberate obstinacy was annoying me and, like mulish children, they were resistant to all my tellings off. 

Eventually, I got an emergency carpenter to come and fix it all. 

– “What’s the problem, exactly?” he said, answering my call.

– “You’ll think I’m a fool,” I said. “But I’ve jammed open my sash window and it absolutely refuses to come back down. I’ve tried everything.”

I was trying hard to keep my desperation and fury under restraint while making sure he turned up. He did turn up. He was – and I felt I deserved this by now – very handsome, tall, blonde with a vague Robert Redford look – and exceedingly cheerful, as if he spent his days unjamming windows for loonies.  As well he might be given how much he charged. It took him five minutes of course. He did explain what the problem was and how to solve it but by this stage I was too exhausted with rage to pay attention.

– I’m never opening that window again,” I said.

– “Well, just in case,” he smiled. “You have my number.”

The patient man at the plant supports supplier sounded as if he were expecting my call.

– “Yes, of course, we’ll take it back and replace it with one which fits.” (Did I just imagine the suppressed laugh as he said this?).

– “Do you want to check the measurements again, while I’m on the phone? Just to be sure? It might be wise.”

“Yes, yes” I replied, hoping the measuring tape had not decided – maliciously – to hide itself during all the drama.

When the replacement finally arrived and all three baskets were fitted over the rose bushes, I felt stupidly proud of my achievement, even though the number of thorn scratches on my arms made me look as if I’d embarked on some serious self-harm. I told the roses – in the sort of tone usually reserved for telling the children that if they did not stop that nonsense right now, there would be no more jam for tea – that they had better flower all summer long in their new baskets, if they knew what was good for them. Which, they did, as you can see.

When not gardening I continued to make my living investigating scandals of all types and repeating in every single report and multiple meetings to everyone who would listen – and quite a few who didn’t want to – every possible version of “Here are the lessons to be learned. They are the same lessons we should have learnt the many times we’ve had the same problem before and could we make sure we learn them this time. Please.” 

Eight years later, I am living in a house on a steep windy hill, a mile from the North Atlantic. My daughter has moved out and taken her bed with her. I decide to surprise my husband by getting a sofa bed and turning her room into a spare living room from where we can enjoy the terrace and views over the garden. My measuring tape is out again and I carefully measure walls and depths and height. The sofa bed is very much smaller than a double bed so of course there will be no problem. I pay the final tranche and notice on the invoice a statement in small letters saying that the suppliers take no responsibility for any difficulties with access. I pay no heed. There are sliding doors from the garden into the floor where the room is. 

Another delivery day: I show the movers the room.

– “Ah”, they go. “The corridor is narrow. We’ll have to see whether we have space to turn into the door. Did you measure the corridor?” 

My daughter is not here so at least my sense of dread and humiliation will not be seen by her. The corridor is indeed too narrow. I did not measure it.  

– “But”, they say, “you could find someone to lift it up over the glass parapet of the terrace and into the room that way.”

And off they go, leaving the sofa in the living room. My builder says that, yes, he can get a digger and park it on the steep lane by the side of the house, lift the heavy sofa over a glass parapet and onto a terrace where three or four strong men will lift it off and into the room.

– “We should wait for the storm to end, though. Let’s speak next week.”

There are risks of course: the total destruction of the terrace, the glass parapet, the sofa and possibly the doors into the room. The cost will be ridiculous. I can see the newspaper headlines right now.

Meanwhile I am asked (and even paid) to explain and write about why organisations find it so hard to learn lessons. Next time I will reply: “Let me tell you a story about rose supports and sofa beds ……”