This week, I can’t fit the children into the house. With the arrival of a polar bear sculpture on the lawn outside Oxford’s Natural History Museum, the Oxfordshire Artweeks season is warming up.

The Jam Factory is appropriately full of taster pieces, and my front room is currently home to 240ft of roadside banner, enough flags and bunting to make American cheerleading look underdone and enough posters to wallpaper a mansion. As I don’t have a mansion, all the boxes make space a little tight...

But first, I am modelling for a world-renowned organisation and statues of me will shortly stand in the world’s premier museum. Take a moment to pause and imagine a willowy wraith on a catwalk, bronze pieces capturing prominent cheekbones for posterity.

And now I’ll explain. Lycra-clad, I’m being cast in plaster by children to create life-size athletes for the Ashmolean’s Artweeks display. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And for my sins, that lifetime’s mine!

Of course, it’s not the first time I’ve done modelling: I’m a dab hand at balloons, lego and Airfix. Nor is it my first experience of plaster casting. When I mentioned the museum’s fine cast collection to The Youngest, he pointed out we have one at home, though ours is less historic, more orthopaedic, and visitors don’t come to see it.

The inaugural piece was his leg, which he broke when I accidentally dropped him down the side of a skip as a baby.

In a revenge attack a year later he pulled my neck out of alignment trying to jump from my arms to streak across an athletics track mid-race. I now have an active relationship with an osteopath and sport an Achilles heel at the top of my spine without having to resort to unusual yoga positions.

So if you hope to watch the Olympics this summer, I recommend you start training now for safe spectatorship.

The Artweeks statues at the Ashmolean (from April 9) will be the perfect place to start.

Esther Browning is festival director of Oxfordshire Artweeks in May. See artweeks.org