A person with two fractured vertebrae and a brace cannot hinge.

What she could do, if her chair was at a particular height and had a particular arm, was come up with her weight through her arms and her right leg with almost no spinal flexion, and look like a person rising from a chair.

So I measured chairs.

That was a genuine part of my job for two years.

I had a tape and a notebook and in the first month I measured the seat height and arm height of every chair in every room Vivienne Bramhall was going to sit in, in six buildings in four cities, and where a chair was wrong I had it swapped, and where it could not be swapped I stood in a particular place so that she could come up against my forearm instead of an arm rest.

The third was duration.