Clueless in Clapham

I have a book called The Writer’s Block. It is designed to stimulate ideas. You open it and there is a photo, a flash-word or an exercise. Inspired by the page, you then proceed to write roughly four hundred words in a freeform fashion. After that, your block should be lifted so you can celebrate by dancing away from the laptop and not doing any more work. As I was blocked today, I opened it and was prompted to write about ‘my first brush with danger’.

The problem (and maybe the comforting thing) is that I don’t recall anything. I know I have been in dangerous situations but I can only remember those that occurred when I was an adult. I have certainly been told about risky times: when I was in nappies, my brother once plonked me on the sitting room’s mantelpiece. I think he thought I was some kind of knick-knack and I needed to be put on display.

Obviously my elevated position made me ga-ga with excitement. There was a host of new, strange looking toys to play with and I was able (quite literally, sports fans) to turn back the clock. However, it wasn’t long before my minute hands had overstretched and I discovered that nappies were not so good at absorbing the pain of a three foot fall onto an imitation marble fireplace. I greeted the floor with a thud and the doctor with a split lip.

As risky as the situation was, it doesn’t qualify as ‘my first brush with danger.’ I wasn’t aware of the perils of gravity and it has had no lasting effects, apart from the minor gastric tremors I experience when I see a pair of matching candlesticks.

Similarly, my other earliest memory of minor harm has no element of risk awareness. Again, I had been dumped somewhere (I wonder if my toddler self was used as the contaminated bundle of lurgy in a kind of evil version of Pass the Parcel). This time it was on a broken dining chair. I had started to enjoy rocking and rolling around, exploring my cushions. I only discovered that the chair was missing a vital component when I rolled backwards.

As gravity again grabbed my bonce, my pinkies enjoyed an upward arc and the last thing I remember seeing before I tumbled off the back of the chair was a pair of tiny feet bookending my mum’s anxious face. That is not danger, it is being part of a large family who loved Laurel and Hardy.

It is possible I’m setting the bar too high as the exercise is accompanied by a black and white picture of a 1950s kid playing with a matchbox and I’m sure I did something similar, but I just can’t remember a ‘brush with danger.’

It must be all the bumps to the head.