For reasons I can no longer remember I've been convinced for almost half my life that I wouldn’t live to see 2013. Not in any serious way (and certainly not to such an extent that I spent 2012 doing anything useful or having memorable experiences), but in a dull, nagging, back of the mind sort of a way that every so often wormed its way horribly to the forefront.
I would consult calendars for important dates and then mentally whisper to myself...
“Right George’s birthday is the sixth. Oh! and look... only three months left now till you’re dead.”
Similarly, I would often look at my debit cards and seeing that they had to be renewed in 2013, inwardly dismiss it.
“Ah, well, that doesn’t matter, I’ll be dead by then.”
The most worrying thing about my ever encroaching death (besides the manifest worry of the entire situation) was that I didn’t know what form it was going to take and I was really very keen for it to be something dignified - like a mafia shoot out or a ceremonial bonfire - and not something stupid and posthumously embarrassing like an severe allergy to a certain type of latex, or one of those toilet related deaths.
I mention this because I do have a considerable track record in this area...
Once, aged five, I almost killed my self with a Cadbury’s Creme Egg. This sounds unlikely and baffling but I was an unlikely and baffling child. Some one passed the egg back to me on a long car journey and, overcome by its sudden glorious appearance, I jammed it whole, into my mouth - where it lodged. Tiny jaws forced open around the confectionary, unable to talk or breath, I looked around in frenzied panic. I tried to cry out but the egg just got in the way. Eventually, alerted by my muffled screams my sister clambered into the backseat and jimmied the egg free with two biros. (I am still of the opinion that Cadbury’s subsequent “How Do You Eat Yours” campaign, in which the option “by cramming it whole into my maw” was conspicuously absent, was designed to reduce the number of complaints the corporation received from the mothers of terminally greedy children.)
A few years later while playing with my second cousin off the coast of the Isle of White I almost killed myself again but this time with a novelty floatation aid rather than with an chocolate egg. We had devised a game wherein one of us would hold a rubber ring up and the other one would dive through it into the water beyond like some kind of beautiful human dolphin. Dolphins were, at the time, very much in vogue among the eight year old community. You wouldn’t give the time of day to someone who didn’t have at least one dolphin themed item about their person. I think I may even have been wearing a dolphin adorned swimming suit at the time. Our respective parents, foreseeing injuries, had banned the game but since it allowed us to emulate our animal idols we willfully ignored them.
“Dolphins don’t need safety, Shannon” I said to my cousin “and they don’t care for rules.”
Convinced, Shannon, ever lithe and graceful, managed to clear the hole in the centre of the ring without touching the sides, and a few seconds later she surfaced - chattering - more dolphin than girl. Driven by jealousy I thrust the ring into her hand and positively launched myself at it. Possibly screaming whatever I considered to be the dolphin war cry to be. Sadly though I did not have the physique of a dolphin but rather the physique of a girl who habitually crammed creme eggs into her face. I got halfway through the ring and there I lodged.
In shock, or more probably, amusement Shannon let go and the ring slowly toppled forward with me crammed helplessly inside it so that I was plunged upside down into the water, my head and torso submerged and my legs feverishly beating the air.
During the long minutes that followed Shannon never once tried to right me. I don’t know why this was, perhaps she had always hated me, or perhaps the image of me upside down trapped, drowning in a rubber ring was so hilarious as to impede any useful actions on her part. Maybe she had just mentally wandered off into her own happy dolphiny thoughts and wasn’t really looking at what I was doing. We were eight after all. Either way things were looking distinctly grim, and my increasingly paniced thrashings (though dramatic and heartfelt) were effective neither in righting me nor releasing me from my inverted rubbery prison.
I would like to say that eventually my sister waded in and jimmied me out of the ring with two massive biros, but what actually happened was that a wave caught me, dashed me painfully against the sea bed and I came up the right way round, hit Shannon (no, I didn’t, but retrospectively I really should have) prized the ring from me, and swam for land making a mental note to end my love affair with dolphins. For the next four or five years I opted for horses instead. Horses do need safety, I reasoned, and they care very much for rules.
Horses - those most cautious and reasonable of animals.
Naturally there has never been a horse that wasn’t stark staring mental. Everybody who has ever ridden one has a considerable arsenal of almost-death anecdotes, but here is the difference... anyone can fall off a horse, or nearly decapitate themselves riding fast under trees, or have their horse bolt, but to be hit in the head with the cast-iron shoe of the horse you are riding... that’s like the start of a joke. But such was my third near miss.
I could perhaps understand being hit with the shoe of a horse in front of you, that's undignified but at least logical. Take a moment to calculate the physics of what happened to me. A shoe comes off under a horse and yet rather than just staying buried in the mud or being flung backwards, it flys, presumably with a boomerang-like trajectory, almost directly upwards, before curving sharply and unnaturally round and catching the rider of same horse hard across the temple. The most baffling thing was that, when I rode back to the stable with a gashed and heavily bleeding head and a now slightly off balance horse they told me that all their animals were very well shod and what I had probably been hit with was some ‘regular (flying!) scrap metal’ - or possibly - they were willing to conceed - a small piece of hoof.
To me this was a strangely telling statement “No, I don’t think he lost a shoe, we take very good care of our horses feet and they are all immaculately shod - it might have been a bit of hoof though - despite us caring for our horses hooves very well sometimes they do just crumble away. It’s one of those things with horses, occasionally their hooves fall apart.”
Anyway, the point of all this is that it is at present 2013, and the more perceptive among you will have noticed that I’m not dead, either by the ridiculous means that my track record implies were likely to finish me off or by other more pedestrian methods. My death neither took the form of embarrassing toilet/egg/shoe related misdemeanor nor dramatic mafia show down, because it didn't come at all.
This is, on the whole, good news, but it's also slightly disorientating in that I have to come to terms with the fact that I was wrong. Here is 2013 - I’ve been mistaken in my beliefs for about ten years. I feel like I’m coming out a cult.
Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things any one of the above events was supposed to kill me and I simply dodged the pre-destined bullet. I'm glad I did because “Asphixiated by a creme egg”, “Drowned upside down nr Shanklin” and “Stray horse shoe to the head” don’t look dignified when written up in an obituary notice. But it makes you think, doesn't it?
Well perhaps it doesn't, either way. I don't really have the time to philosophise at any great length as I now have to renew all three of my debit cards.
Anyway, Happy New Year!
