SUDDENLY, my life has begun to revolve around keys. Two hotels into my journey across Germany, I have wrestled with all manner of the wretched things.

There have been keys that insist on being turned several times in a precise sequence that must be followed or failure will surely result. Then there are the cuttingedge keys where the chip always seems to have lost power once you get your sweaty mitts on it.

Keys, keys… and yet more keys.

Now I’m holding the ultimate, the king of keys… the ones that will allow me to gain entry to Colditz Castle.

That’s right – I’ve been taken to the notorious Oflag IV C where, nearly 70 years ago, a number of naughty chaps showed their gratitude to their German hosts by trying to escape all the time.

Pat Reid, Airey Neave – they were the heroes of the schoolboy’s universe until the world discovered celebrity and self-obsession.

So here I am in Colditz, making my bed in the former German officers’ quarters. Task completed, I wander to the window and gaze at the cobbles 60 feet below and wonder whether I would have had the guts to knot a few sheets together, never mind crawling through a tunnel with barely inches to spare.

For back in those stir-crazy days in the early 1940s, that’s what those blokes were doing. Escape was everything.

I wonder about that famous glider. Never mind about flying it, what about the know-how to build it? I could barely follow the instructions to an Airfix kit, let alone construct a craft made from scraps of wood and paper and designed using complex geodetic theory.

No, disguise would probably be my best chance. I consider the case of the Frenchman who masqueraded as a woman. Then there was Neave, who tried to get out in a Wermacht uniform but was captured because the colour of the clothing was wrong. Or how about trying the only successful leapfrogover- the-wall escape?

One method is definitely ruled out. And that’s just making a break for it like Mike Sinclair, the only man who was killed in this place, shot as he tried to clamber up the perimeter wall.

No. I’ll just have to sit tight and worry about nothing more than whether the key will work when I return to my cell after dinner tonight… the only man in history worried about breaking INTO Colditz.