MikeM tersely twits me after the Low Cuisine post. Equally tersely I twit him back and pass the night worrying if I've been OTT. That I might have lost a friend. I needn't have. Apart from many other talents MikeM has rubber-ball resilience (see his comment).What's more he was justified: he'd been working on a roof. Now there's a funny thing.
In my extreme youth, during the Plantagenet era, I did rock climbing. Not well, but then we aren't all Olympians. From this you might conclude I'd conquered vertigo. On natural rock, perhaps, less so with buildings. For one thing the “slopes” on buildings tend to be vertical, for another, buildings are man-made. Who knows whether the chippie, the roofer or the brick-layer wasn’t careless just when it mattered?
Our previous house sported an X-shape TV antenna. Defunct and loosely attached to the chimney. During the night it tapped, oh how it tapped.
I had a two-piece extendable ladder but needed to hire a roof ladder. Easy-peasy. One slides this device up the angled roof until two large hooks engage with the roof ridge. All that remains is to step across from the conventional ladder to the roof ladder.
Uh-huh! Those hooks were springy! As my weight transferred, the roof ladder stretched - according to a downwards and outwards vector. How many tentative goes before I put my faith in a pantheon of physicists and stepped up? A lot.
Removing the antenna was quickly done and I sat on the roof ridge, surveying my neighbours from a superior position, blissfully content. Contentment is best when it’s hard-won and I considered my earlier unease. Almost a sensuous memory.
Now I think of MikeM. Long past stretchy moments and entitled to be terse. Cheers, mate!
During the course of over 1000 posts (for me) we have several times exchanged thoughts on the business of enjoyment, pleasure, contentment and the like and not always seen eye to eye. I have often cited the satisfaction from sense of physical achievement - now, at last you are on my wavelength - "Contentment is best when hard-won." D'accord.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: Hard-won doesn't necessarily imply physical activity. Succeeding with a verse, a moral dilemma, an argument may all be hard-won triumphs. In this instance physical activity was incidental; I struggled with fear. What's more the fear proved groundless. A double abstraction.
ReplyDeleteI've stepped away from a couple situations - one involving a roof ladder - and I have no regrets about doing so. In fact, I retrospectively view "chickening out" as an achievement. One has to respect fear at some point - it exists for a reason - and as my boss said after I crept down from another high place, "they say you usually fall when you are afraid you might." He took my place aloft (planks between collar ties, 12 feet long, 20 feet up in a Tudor truss system)and finished the job. But not without kicking a gallon of paint over the edge, making for hours of clean-up. I bought ropes and safety harnesses years ago, and I'm not afraid to use them. I will never be ready to climb trees.
ReplyDeleteMikeM: You're right, my post was incomplete. What exactly went through my mind before I successfully stepped up on to the roof ladder? Old age does, to some extent, inform the moment. I've known for many years now I am not macho-man, that I am something of a coward, both physically and morally. These were probably the reasons I didn't progress as a rock-climber; that my only two accidents while rock climbing could not have been foreseen (meaning for what it's worth I climbed "within myself"); that I gave up the sport soon after I met VR and my priorities in life changed.
ReplyDeleteI can't be sure but I think I must have rationalised the thing. It wasn't a step into the absolute unknown. That I'd seen roof-ladders being used, understood the principles (or thought I did), and that I was applying them safely. The "stretching" was unnerving but could be explained; it seemed to be proof that the hooks over the roof ridge were properly engaged and that the stretching was making them more secure. There are of course holes in this logic but there are occasions in life when we face some something new and resolve things intellectually. What makes this different are the consequences of risk.
The event took place, I think, in 1980. I'm well aware that industrial safety has come on enormously since then. I've written about this in the logistics magazine I edited during the last eleven years before I retired in 1995. I agree entirely with this changing attitude and have poked fun at those who regret the onset of the "nanny" state which, they say, is taking the spice out of life. Certainly if I were in the business, as you are, I would have all the sort of kit you mention. After all the seeds were sown back in the mid-fifties when I spent a month at the Outward Bound Mountain School and was taught rope technique - which I always applied. The one occasion I didn't apply it seemed justified (ie, I had done the climb many times before) but it just happened to be one of the unforeseen events.
As I've got older I've chickened out more often, frequently at VR's insistence. Notably to do with electrical repairs. The question remains: was the roof-ladder a foolish decision? Well, I didn't fall and my view of the situation appears to be justified. Perhaps the best I can say is I wouldn't recommend it for others. But that is for now, what I describe was then. Time modifies us.