bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel,

It is common practice in the building trade to house external storage tanks in large wooden boxes consisting of two inch thick plywood paneling. One of the very many interesting things about plywood paneling is that, if it is subjected to torrential rain for a substantial length of time, it becomes inundated, heavy, and prone to detaching itself from whatever it is attached to, especially if what it is attached to is similarly unstable sections of plywood paneling.

Once this happenstance has been occurred, all that is needed is an external force – such as winds in excess of 100 mph – like those occurring in the SE10 postal district of London at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon – to apply itself to the waterlogged storage tank housing for one of the eighteen foot long side panels to break free and hurtle at great speed through the air until its progress is impeded by something, such as the roof of a covered market.

Here, momentum will either be dissipated back into the panel by the roof, thus causing it to bounce off or shatter, or it will smash straight though and plummet seventy feet earthwards towards shoppers and traders, destroying a stall selling knitted head wear, ricocheting onto the roof of a stall belonging to London’s primary apron vendor, buckling the steel bars above his lovely head, before coming to rest, thankfully as a spent force, on a lady and small child. This, as you may already have guessed, is what actually happened. It was all so quick and loud that the first I knew if it was having a woman who had been carried into my stall by the passing projectile apologise for the intrusion and explain that ‘Something like this always happens when I try to buy a hat’.

Calm, sturdy British readers will be pleased to learn that similar reserve was displayed by the lady/small boy combo who between them formed the final resting place of the rogue panel. ‘It’s OK’, she said, ‘He probably didn’t even notice. Last year in Bournemouth a pidgeon flew into him and broke his glasses’. In an afternoon of upper lips so stiff you could iron a shirt on them, the boy, who was perhaps seven, was the bravest soldier of all, rapidly breathing in and out through his nose for some time in a successful attempt to avoid bursting into tears.  In fact, the nearest anyone got to unseemly displays of panic was in the couple of seconds silence that immediately followed the implausibly loud noise that a large piece of wood makes as it passes though a roof, when the only sound was that of umbrellas being put up to keep the rain off.

It all put me in mind of the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo and his famous exchange with – yes, that’s right – Lord Uxbridge, shortly after they came under fire from a French battery during a critical stage of the days’ fisticuffs. ‘My God Sir’ said the Duke to the Lord ‘You’ve lost your leg’. ‘My God Sir’ said the Lord to the Duke, glancing at the remains of his left thigh, ‘So I have’, before sliding off his horse to quietly bleed to death out of everyone’s way, probably while doing a crossword.

Photards: Top The architectural beauty of Archway, London N19.

Middle: Cordoned-off stalls underneath the hole in the roof, Sunday morning.  They are good pitches, too, which led to a fair amount of disgruntlement.

Bottom: Chubby fireman removing bits of roof that were all hanging down.   Was persuaded up the ladder by excellent views of the KFC on Deptford Bridge.

Facebook Back down to double figures again, with two members leaving last week.   I think this question has been posed before, but who the fuck leaves a Facebook group?

Twitter Here’s us on yesterday’s news social networking phenomenon, Twitter.