“Come on baby, I need you to trust me. Follow me into the pain cave. I know you can do it. We’ll only be there for three minutes, and I’ll be with you all the way.”

Internally, I am shuddering with horror, but I engage my core (who knew a 48-year-old still had one?) and remind myself that, far from being forced here at gunpoint, I have, in fact, signed up to have this high-on-life fitness freak whisper sweet nothings in my ear. Worse still, I am paying for the privilege of hearing them.

Like every terrible thing that ever happens to me, this horrid state of affairs is my husband’s fault. Without him there would be no children. Without children there would be no Book Week. Without Book Week, there would be no book parade. And without book parade, there would be no reason for me to have destroyed my right knee schlepping costume-related feathers and hot glue back from the shops. And there would be no rehab featuring a stationary bike and ­accompanying online personal trainer (or soulless, poison-spewing slave driver, as I prefer to think of him).

The path to fixing my knee has been, fittingly enough, as landmine-littered as the one I should have negotiated in the first place. For years now, I have blithely floated along in a warm sea of “have problem, take this antibiotic and it will magically disappear after five to seven days”, which is why I was practically howling with outrage when not one but three orthopaedic specialists told me to forget about prescribing anything. Too old for one kind of surgery and too young for another, the only solution I qualified for involved an unholy troika of Pilates, physiotherapy and a godforsaken stationary bike. With an online personal trainer. Who wanted me to hang out with him, and I cannot stress this enough, in a pain cave.

Initially, my quest to turn things around began, in the way of all good lifestyle overhauls, with a spirited round of mental gymnastics, during which I almost had ­myself convinced that it was perfectly reasonable to do away with the joint all together; or that a week on the couch watching other people exercise on repeats of The Biggest Loser would have an osmosis-like effect on my own knee, especially if I stuck it on the coffee table where it was given a clear viewing platform. Long story short: it didn’t work.

Fine, I thought. I’ll just do nothing for ages and that will definitely sort it out. Unfortunately, that was also a bust – and it was right around this point that my knee started feeling like it was being held in place by broken glass and a particularly vicious clump of hammer-wielding stinging nettles.

Enter the physiotherapist. Points in her favour: she wasn’t a stationary bike. Strikes against her? She came in a package deal with a Pilates studio. She was packing acupuncture needles. She had one of those giant pastel sippy cups containing kale and freshly squeezed endorphins. She talked a lot about the importance of staying fit in your youth while I listened earnestly (or astral projected out of there on a bolting horse, leaving a shut gate in my wake … you be the judge).

I persisted with her appointments for a while, not least because they largely consisted of her sticking me with dry needles and asking if I could feel any improvement in the knee. (Officially? Absolutely! Unofficially? Absolutely not!) Ultimately though, it turned out that all the Pilates equipment in the adjoining gym wasn’t just an expensive storage rack for coats and that indeed I was expected to use it to perform actual Pilates. No problem, I thought, reminding myself that I’d read the Daily Mail and seen Justin Hemmes’ baby mama doing a ­similar thing about 18 seconds after giving birth. In a curious reversal of circumstances, though, I spent about 18 seconds on the machines before feeling like I was about to give birth to Justin Hemmes, who seemed to be arriving sideways in the posterior position.

As she regarded my labouring self with her sippy cup of double-shot decaf soy wellness latte, the physio looked faintly disgusted. “Face the front,” she said, pointing in a direction of the room that looked uncannily like Just Another Wall. “Not that front – this front,” she barked, before remembering that a “holistic” approach to women’s health included pretending to be nice to a certain directionally challenged, inflexible-in-every-sense-of-the-word client.

After a couple more rounds of “put your feet in these stirrups, lift your hips, try to relax, engage your core”, I wasn’t sure whether to ask for my gynaecological results or an assessment on my left ankle, which I had accidentally smashed against ­another stupid machine in my haste to flee, never to return.

All of which brings us, inevitably, to the stationary bike that I caved in and bought when it became apparent that no amount of freshly juiced positive vibes were going to turn me into a person able to discern where the front of the studio was while her legs were entangled in Pilates stirrups.

It’s been about a month and it’s fair to say the throbbing in my knee has largely migrated to my brain. I hate the bike passionately. The seat hurts, the spandex pulls and the dinky little in-built fan wouldn’t cool a passing dust mote. And don’t even get me started on the online personal trainer and his hooray-it’s-time-for-more-punishment schtick. Here’s the curious thing, though. The more I pedal, the angrier I get. The angrier I get, the faster I go. And all of a sudden, the thought of three ­minutes in an enclosed space with my personal trainer doesn’t seem as diabolical as it once did.

Hell, maybe we can bring in my husband, since he totally created this mess in the first place. Saddle up, baby, I whisper malevolently, it’s time for us to enter the pain cave. For the next three minutes, it’s survival of the fittest. Literally.

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