The latest issue of Cattails is out and I appear in it twice – page 89 and page 91. However, they aren’t the best bits of the issue and there are 193 pages of good stuff to read. These two mark the point where I was really struggling to write. Things, as I have said, are looking up again now.
One of my neighbours has just been playing fast and lose with the laws of gravity, but has finally succeeded in putting a bird box in his conifer. It’s at least twelve feet off the ground, and much better than my weedy attempts. I usually chicken out when it gets to eight feet. I have bounced a number of times when falling off ladders and don’t see any point in pushing my luck. The strange thing I find is that if I were writing a novel I would have the fall in slow motion with plenty of time for flashbacks and reminiscence but in real life I often only have time to think “Oh . . .” as the ladder moves, then find myself lying on the floor. In fact, once I merely found myself lying on the floor, without the initial “Oh . . .”
I’ve fallen off four times, which is hardly a great sample, but at no time has my life flashed before me. That might be because I was between six and twelve feet up when it happened. If you fall off from fifty feet it is probably different.
It was also slightly different the time that I fell off due to the wood-wormed rung. I don’t count that among the four falls, which were all due to my carelessness – over-reaching or setting the ladder up on soft ground (correct, I’m not a fast learner).
On the way up, using a ladder from the shed of a gardening customer, I note the woodworm on the way up and thought “I must be careful on the way down”. However, I was so grateful to be on the way down (it was a tricky trimming operation twenty feet up a pear tree) that I forgot to be careful. The rung collapsed, as did the next one, I began to overbalance, I thought of the concrete slabs that were waiting, and I grabbed a branch, ending up swinging like a monkey. It is funny now, and you have permission to laugh.
I did learn from that. I bought a ladder and never used a customer’s ladder again.
The funniest thing i ever did was cut a dead branch on a tree. It was about twenty feet up (it seems an ominous distance when you read this post. I cut it using my pruning saw on a long pole, and my feet were firmly on the ground. The lesson I learned from this was that branches fall faster than you think so you should never stand directly under one you are cutting. I protected my head by fending it off with my forearm. The impact drove flakes of bark into my arm, which took some cleaning up, and ten years later I still have a lump on my arm where it hit.
I think 500 words is enough for now. If anyone is interested I have another selection of disaster stories, some of which feature electricity.