Monday 18 July 2011

Key

There is a new era dawning...

He's taken his first steps... He's survived being on his own in the big bad world... But from September he will reach yet another milestone.. My son will get his own front-door key!

Yes, with the advent of secondary school, and the careful positioning of our new home so as to be in walking distance, there only the small matter of giving him the ability to actually get into the house to be faced. But am I worried? Of course I'm blinking worried! He's eleven! Not only does he have to remember to take his key with him he will also need to remember not to lose it! And I was eleven myself once!

Actually, for a while it wasn't an issue as my mother didn't work when I was first at secondary, making that long walk back home so as to pocket my bus fare (See 'Intervention'). But when my sister went off to college my Mum decided also to go back to work and for the last few years of my school life I too became a latch-key kid. Difference was that I didn't take a key with me. Instead we had one hidden outside the house.

Rather than the old faithful 'flower-pot beside the door' or the 'on a string through the letterbox' methods we went for the less conventional one of 'in a plastic tub at the bottom of the chest freezer at the back of the garage'. Freezers were just becoming popular then and I'm not even sure your could get upright ones for in the house at the time. Either way what we had was a vast, coffin-like box that would open with a sucking crackle and "Whump!", followed but a rising mist of frozen air that any Sci-Fi film maker would have given their right, rubber tentacle for!

I'd arrive at the house, open the garage door and then close it behind me so that no one would see what I was doing. Then open the freezer, retrieve the key from under the animal carcasses and choc-ices and then wait. Why? Because to my way of thinking any would be burglar spying on what I was doing would think that the process of key retrieval was a far more complicated affair, involving the deactivation of several deadly traps.

"Cover over the snake pit... retract the poisoned spikes... power down laser grid... and lash back giant stone boulder..."

Certainly sounds better than "Lift up Arctic Roll and grab Tupperware!"

Satisfied that the ne'er-do-wells had been put off I would emerge with the key and go to the door. The key itself of course would be freezing cold and one day I decided to see just how cold it was.

Now, there are certain things in this Universe that just cannot be avoided. Moments of destiny which will happen again and again. For decades people have unknowingly attached suction cups to there foreheads only to be immediacy scarred by a perfectly circular bruise that lasts for weeks. Thousand of curious young men have wrongly become intimate with a vacuum cleaner! But one such event surely goes back as far as the Bronze Age. An ancient alumni which I joined that day. The grand order of the "I'll just see how cold this piece of frozen metal is WITH MY TONGUE!"

At first there was no pain. Just intense cold followed by realisation that this very cold thing on your tongue wanted to stay there and just get colder! Picture me if you can, key stuck in mouth, standing at my front door which was still locked! Now this was a Yale key and the round head of which was attached to me so for the merest of moments the thought went through my mind that I could unlock it with my tongue.

I was still yet to have a girlfriend at this time and what kisses I had experienced were of the good old-fashioned English variety and in no way Francais. So my tongue muscles were sadly not up to the task. There was simply nothing for it. I would have to pull it off. Thing was that by now there seemed to be very little difference between the metal and the flesh. You could feel the fusion of ice to tongue. But regardless I gripped the key and pulled...

And did it hurt I hear you sak. Lets just say that any burglars still holding out in their hidey-holes would most certainly have fled from the screams of pain that rushed from a mouth now stripped of a layer of skin and burnt as if by a scalding pop-tart!

So, on second thoughts maybe a nice sturdy key-chain would be the best thing for my son. Welded to his under-crackers, naturally...

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Friday 8 July 2011

Snag

"The city looks so peaceful from up here."

"Anything is peaceful from one thousand, three hundred and fifty-three feet."


'Ferris Bueller's Day Off'

I am a great lover of heights along with the process of reaching them. I never got into climbing itself but I did scale the odd seaside cliff-face in my youth and when working in the theatre the best place was always up in the fly tower. But for me nothing beats climbing a tree. Is it an inherited gene that makes me want to do the meercat thing and find a high vantage point?  Or is it like all good mountain climbers just 'because it's there'? Or am I simply a chimp at heart? Whatever the reason those limbs of delight have always tempted me.

As already mentioned I've recently moved house and although our new garden is wonderful I was met in it the other day by a very grumpy faced daughter.

"What's up?" I asked. "Don't you like the garden?"

"There are no good climbing trees" she said. And she's right. Although we have five or six trees not one of them stands out as a being particularly good for scrabbling about in.

When I was a kid in my first house in Benfleet had much the same problem. My second house in Thundersly on the other hand was just smothered in good trees. There was an old oak tree which I used to ascend in the company of ants, who were forever trooping up and down. Then there were two large ash trees which protected the front of the house and if you had the bottle seemed to go on up forever. And lastly a laurel that not only had a natural seat at the top (plus a second spot for friends) but also included a glass-bottom-boat style viewing gallery halfway up that overlooked the footpath by our house.The temptation to drop things on people's head was only overshadowed by the exhilaration of seeing without being seen - like the Predator but without the dreadlocks.

But in the first garden in Benfleet I had the choice of only one tree, a silver birch. Now I love silver birch trees as they seem almost magical with their white bark and silver-green leaves. There is something particularly mystical and elf-like when seen together as a woodland group. Unfortunately their beautiful trunks are very slippery so not good for shinning up and the branches, certainly on ours, started higher than I could reach at age 5. Luckily for me the tree grew right next to our fence which was a good sturdy one, not like the wafer thin things you get today. The fence was made of diagonal wooden beams which were easy to climb and once at the top you could sit on the fence and reach the first branches of the tree. There were no perfects spots but I could wedge myself between any one of the branches and the trunk and merrily sit there for hours listening to the wind in the leaves.

Getting down again was more complicated. Once back on the fence I'd have to execute the one manoeuvre I didn't enjoy which was turning from sitting to climbing position. I would end up either skinning my knees or scratching my stomach or slipping too soon altogether, scrapping down the fence and grazing any number of things in the process. One day I decided that the time had come to simply jump down. I sat on the fence as usual and shuffled along to be clear of the trunk. Then one... two... three... I slid my bottom off the fence and miraculously stopped, just hanging in mid air!

I could fly!!!!!

Well no, obviously I couldn't but my brain was unable to immediately deduce exactly what had happened. In actual fact the belt loop on my trousers was caught on the top of the fence, resulting in my unlikely levitation. Again, it's a credit to the workmanship of the age that the trousers held my weight with nary a rip nor a tare. However, this also meant that no amount of wriggling would release me. Thankfully being a nice day my Dad was seeing to his self-sufficiency vegetable patch. He responded to my pitiful cry for help by making his way from the between the rhubarb and the runner-beans to see what was going on.

"You can fly!"

Actually, I don't think he did say that. But being the excellent Dad that he is he would have given me a conspiratorial smirk at my predicament, collected a step ladder from the shed and unhitched me.

Thankfully there were no scars mentally, physically or arboreally. I continued my tree climbing throughout my childhood, then also at Drama School (there was a particular tree that several Thespians in training made use of) and so on into adult and parenthood. The time may now finally have come to leave it to those younger, more nimble and carrying less weight than myself. And in particular my own kids. To which ends I have my eye one tree in the garden which may not be a climber from the ground up but with some work has another more exciting possibility... tree-house!

But that's a project for another day and possibly another Random Word. In the meantime if you're able I urge you to go climb a tree and let it give you a boost... 

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