The unfortunate individual whose tumble down a museum staircase left three hugely valuable Chinese vases in pieces has attributed the accident to a "Norman Wisdom moment".
Nick Flynn was visiting the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge last month when a loose shoelace, a lack of handrails and a bit of bad luck brought about the destruction of the Qing dynasty vases, thought to be worth £100,000 in total.
Although the museum did not name the 42-year-old, he was tracked down by a Sunday newspaper and asked to recall the events of that fateful Wednesday afternoon.
Mr Flynn, of Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire, said disaster struck after he realised he had gone up the wrong staircase and swung around to come down. He trod on his untied shoelace and fell forward. "I was trying to grab hold of something but the walls were smooth marble and I couldn't stop myself," he told the Mail on Sunday.
An instant later, Mr Flynn's 6ft, 13st frame was hurtling towards the first of the vases, all of which were displayed on a windowsill. "Although [I knew] the vase would break I didn't imagine it would be loose and crash into the other two," he said. "I'm sure I only hit the first one and that must have flown across the windowsill and hit the next one, which then hit the other, like a set of dominos."
Mr Flynn, who is reported to have been banned from the museum for the near future, added he was truly sorry.
"I can say with my hand on my heart that it was not deliberate ... it was just my Norman Wisdom moment, just one of those unbelievably unlucky things that can sometimes happen. I went into a marble windowsill and collided with a vase which shattered into thousands of razor-sharp shards and I was unhurt. I think it must have been a miracle."
The vases smashed by Mr Flynn date from the latter years of the reign of the Kangxi emperor (1662-1722) and are painted in enamels with traces of gilding.
A spokeswoman for the Fitzwilliam Museum said that the vases had been sitting on the windowsill for decades and had never met with an accident until Mr Flynn's visit. "Not everything is shut away in glass cases. An accident of this nature does, of course, bring the issue into sharper relief." The museum is evaluating the damage, and it is thought the vases will be restored.