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'A
warning take by me: or, once bitten, twice bitten...
by
Pat Morrissey
Reproduced
from in focus 68
(June 2000)
Does
this sound familiar to you?
There's
a bloke driving along a country road and, as he passes a lunatic
asylum, he has a wheel fall of his car. When he looks, he
discovers that the garage where he had the car serviced has
omitted to replace the four wheel-nuts on this one wheel.
He scratches his head, wondering how to sort the problem out,
when a voice behind him says 'Why not remove one wheel-nut
from the other three wheels and use them on the fourth wheel
till you get to the next petrol station? That way, you can
continue your journey and you know the wheel is safely anchored.'
'Brilliant!' says the driver, and looks round to
see one of the residents of the home sitting on the wall beside
the entrance, kicking his heels in the air and grinning amiably
about him. 'How come you're living in this place?'
says the grateful driver, 'You seem such a sensible chap*.
'Well*, says the other, 'it's my relatives' fault,
really. They didn't want me to inherit a share of the family
fortune so they had me committed instead...' 'What a
scandal!' declares the driver, 'that's disgraceful!
What an appalling travesty of justice!! I shall write to my
MP as soon as I get home, never fear, young man!!' He
turns to get back into his car, and a half a brick lands smartly
on the back of his head.
Stunned,
in pain and bleeding, he turns round to hear the other chap
say, 'Urn, you won't forget now, will you?'...
A
bit like this driver, I too only ever learn the hard way.
What follows is a true story, despite anything you may have
heard in the Holland Club on a Wednesday evening.
A
few of us, (including our esteemed Chairman), were on a dive
trip in the Maldives at the end of January. We had been promised
close encounters with mantas, and by God, we had had them;
for two days, we had crouched low on a reef where these beautiful
creatures habitually come in to clean and to feed. You could
reach up and stroke their underbellies; all around me, there
was nothing but the (metaphorical) popping of flashcubes.
As
we headed away from the site, the dive guide - WHO WILL REMAIN
NAMELESS, CAP.L NICHOLLS OF MALDIVES SCUBA TOURS!!! - asked
if we'd like any films developed. He had done sterling work
for us previously, and so we gladly handed over all our manta
ray films; I know that I had 4, Linda put in 4, and there
were 2 others as well. Then we went off for dinner, confidently
leaving Carl playing with chemicals and such... Some thirty
or forty minutes later, we re-entered the stateroom to find:
a)
Carl hunched over his tank of chemical brews,
b) Ten exposed lengths of our precious film slung mournfully
onto a nearby chair, and
c) Not much else.
It
didn't take long to discover the awful truth: the first batch
of chemical had been 'duff', and thus five films went west
without more ado, and then (inexplicably) Carl had tried the
next batch of five to see if the some thing would happen again.
- And it had.
This
was me learning the hard way, yet again. Why had I put ALL
my manta films in for development at once? Why hadn't I just
given in one or two at a time, to minimize the chances of
so catastrophic a loss? More to the point, (since she has
oodles more sense and experience than me), why had la Chairman
done the same? The answer must lie in our innocent eagerness
to see if we had managed to capture anything of these creatures'
undoubted beauty and magical appeal to the eye; instead of
which, of course, we got naff all.
I
will draw the veil of modesty over the weeping and gnashing
of teeth that followed this terrible incident - and that was
just Carl, poor boy - and say that I learned my lesson and
never again will I be so stupid. That we did in fact manage
an unexpected encounter with mantas later in the trip is the
subject of an entirely different -though no less Homeric -
tale, for adult ears alone in the darkness of a corner of
the bar...
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