At my expense
I am usually the butt of most guilty laughs due to my tall, quite inelegant manner and a habit of making an arse out of myself. I blame the extra time it takes for nerve impulses to travel from my brain to my hands and feet due to my extra height. A tenuous excuse you may agree.

Anyway one particular family holiday when I was aged about 15 we went on a canal barge holiday down the Avon with my aunt, uncle and cousins in tow too. As the kids we excitedly hurried around whenever it came to locks and bridges to break up the long sections of crawling along at the sort of speeds usually reserved for emphysemic pensioners tottering down the local post office.

This particular bridge was a swing bridge where you push it open and closed using a beam projecting out of the back of it, that way you're always on the bank. We'd already been through it once on the way out and were coming through it on the way back to the start. I'd eyed it up on the way through and figured it was ripe for some sort of James Bond-esque manoueuvre whereby I'd push it closed from the bridge end and swing over the river from one bank to the other amidst gasps and a round of applause from the watching gallery.

It didn't quite work this way.

I started off with an almighty push and jumped off the bank, hanging onto the end of the bridge. It stuttered and stopped in the middle of the river, me dangling from the handrail at the end. Now I wasn't reknown for my upper body strength (I've still never really managed a convincing chin up as I'm a heavy bastard) and I couldn't haul myself up onto the bridge. My sister did try to push the bridge clsoed on her own but being about 12 she didn't have the required grunt. After maybe a minute postponing the inevitable and gathering a small crowd (the same ones I was hoping for a hero's welcome from) my grip gave out and I landed in a sludgy canal up to around my chest. As I waded folornly back to the edge I was greeted by my parents, aunt and uncle and bunch of passers by sniggering and asking me what on earth possessed me to do something so stupid. They struggled to haul me out of the canal as they were all giggling too much. Red faced, I retreated down into the barge to shower off the filth, rat urine and whatever else you find in your local canal and pretty much refused to come out until I was sure that all the people who saw me had gone.

I would like to say I had learned a valuable lesson that day and that I always thought through the likely consequences before embarking on something like that again but I'd be lying. I really do want to be James Bond.
(bigjonnydynamite, Fri 23 Jul 2010, 2:24, Reply)