The curious incident of my elderly mother stuck in a lift

Last week my mother got stuck in a lift. This sounds like the set-up to a joke, but I’ve racked my brains and I’m yet to come up with a decent punchline, because it’s not a joke. It happened in real life to my mother, an 88-year-old who is not fully mobile either physically or in terms of using the pay as you go phone, which may or may not be lying at the bottom of her handbag.

After the incident occurred, she emerged an hour and a half later unscathed, having given the lift a bit of a kicking – and she didn’t bother to tell me for a full 24 hours. When she finally got round to filling me in on the events, I posted the following comment on Twitter: “My extraordinarily brave 88-year-old mum spent 90 minutes trapped in a small lift yesterday and the first person she phoned was her hairdressers to apologise for being late.”

This was true. When the alarm bell in the lift received no response, my mother decided she would have to resort to plan B and use her dreaded mobile phone. Now this is pretty momentous, considering that, despite carrying it with her most of the time, she never switches it on. She even admitted to me that for a few seconds she froze. “Then I got a grip,” she said, “and dialled the hairdressers.”

Her next call was to the lift operators.

Over the next couple of days, this tweet got 11,000 likes and on Monday morning it appeared as a conversational topic on Loose Women. Had my mother been watching, she would have died with embarrassment, but fortunately the potential topic of “stoicism and the elderly” was quickly hijacked by the importance of keeping one's hairdresser onside. Perspective everyone!