My Head in My Hands
When I was somewhat younger than I am now, I used to live in a flat above a flower shop. Now, this was a flat and a flower shop that had, at some stage prior to their being a flat and a flower shop, been simply a regular, semi-detached, two-level house. And then a previous owner had split up the two floors of the property, creating a flat on the first floor and a flower shop – although it probably wasn’t a flower shop then, but some other shop of indeterminate nature – on the ground floor.
All of which is by way of saying that the flat did not have an internal staircase within the property, but had its own, dedicated entrance, and therefore staircase, on the outside. A huge, black, wrought-iron staircase, in fact.
Which was very nice. In that it meant that I did not need to have anything to do with the shop people when I wished to enter and exit the flat, and, because of the huge, black, wrought-iron-ness of the staircase, I was unlikely ever to be burgled in the night. Not by stealth, at any rate.
It did cause me one problem, though.
One morning, I got up for work. It was the middle of the winter, and snow had been falling all through the night. Now, I was working as a postman at the time, and to get up for work, I had to rise and exit the house by 4.30am. None of which had ever proven to be a problem before.
But this particular morning, the snow had settled all about, and as the night had become rather colder as it went on, the bottom layer of snow on the steps outside the flat – those huge, black, wrought-iron steps – had turned to ice. The top layer was as fresh and crisp as snow can be, on the other hand.
I’d exited the flat in snow before. You just minded your step, and all was fine. But not this morning, oh no. For as soon as my foot made contact with the top, fresh, crispy layer of snow, it immediately sank through to the bottom, cold, icy layer, and before you could say ‘How unfortunate was that?’ my foot was gone from beneath me.
And well gone.
My whole body did a single semi-cartwheel, until my feet were away above my head, and that’s when it happened. With a loud crunching noise, my neck made upside-down contact with the huge, black, wrought-iron staircase that should have been beneath my feet, and my head came clean off.
Ouch!
But here’s where the problem lay. There was I, lying headless and prostrate at the top of the huge, black, wrought-iron steps, and yet my head had bounced and rolled off somewhere else entirely. And the really ironic thing was that I could still see myself lying there, headless and prostrate, at the top of the huge, black, wrought-iron steps, from an indeterminate vantage point some distance away.
As I watched, I told myself to get up, and come and find my head. So that’s what I did. Very gingerly. Very gingerly indeed.
I put one arm out (and to this day, I cannot say if it was the left or the right arm, such was my confusion in those first moments after the accident), and grasped tightly onto the rail that ran down the side of the building, along the edge of the steps. And then I slowly, oh so very slowly, raised myself up until I was standing.
What a very strange feeling that was, to be standing there, at the top of those huge, black, wrought-iron steps, as if to be looking out at the cold, dark, snowy morning about me, only for my eyes to be seeing something entirely different: as they blinked back the falling flakes of snow, those eyes watched on as I very, very carefully, put one foot in front of the other, all the while clasping very tightly onto the rail that ran down the side of the building, along the edge of the steps, and one very careful step at a time, descended the staircase.
All of which must have taken something in the region of four or five minutes. Not a great deal of time, to look at it in black and white here on the page, but you ask yourself this: four or five minutes to descend a staircase comprising eighteen steps? It took forever.
That was when the really difficult bit began. How to find my head. Or, rather, how to find my body – if you look at it from the perspective of the head. And if you’re looking at it, then I suppose that’s where you’d expect to be looking at it from.
And looking at it I was. Looking at my body, that is, as it stumbled about, this way and that, arms extended and flailing, as I tried to tell it which way to turn in order to come towards me. But have you ever tried playing a computer game, with the handset programmed backwards, so that if you tried going left you went right instead? Or vice versa? Because that’s how it was, my head lying there in the snow, trying to get the body to come and find it.
Every time I thought I was telling it to come towards me, it turned and went the other way instead.
Finally, though, finally, I managed to organise the body until, kneeling in the crisp fresh snow, it leaned forwards and took me in its arms.
Now, these were the days before the internet and DVD-recorders and The X-Factor and, more importantly, mobile ‘phones, and so the next stage of proceedings wasn’t as simple as it might have been had I been able to just flip open my mobile and call someone for help. No, the nearest telephone box was about a half a mile’s walk up the road. In the snow.
I picked up my head – or rather, maybe, I got my body to pick me up – and then made the rather tricky procedure of getting back up to my feet (have you ever tried standing up while holding your own head in your two hands? Well, have you?), and then I decided how to go about making the walk to the telephone box. Because (and how much easier things might have been had this been a simple fiction, a fairytale, in which I might have screwed my head back onto my shoulders and all had become well again) walking to the telephone box wasn’t going to be easy with my head firmly secured in my hands.
I thought about holding it aloft, in much the same place as it might have been used to being – in other words, just above my neck – but that way I might easily have lost my balance in the snow, and if I’d fallen again, who knew where my head might end up landing?
I thought about walking ‘headless horseman’-style, with my head tucked safely in the crook of my left (or right) arm – and even tried it. But – and I’m sure if you ever were to become a headless horseman, you’d soon find this out – that wasn’t anything like as easy as you might imagine. For one thing, with your head tucked securely in the crook of your arm, it’s very difficult to keep it on the one hand balanced so that the eyes are level (and you try walking straight when your eyes aren’t level with one another, it isn’t easy), and on the other hand pointing forwards, so that you can see where you’re going; no, it has an alarming tendency to keep rolling itself around to the side, so that your vision is suddenly skew-whiffed and then impaired by the obstruction of your belly. So walking ‘headless horseman’-style was out.
Eventually, I settled upon a compromise between the two. I held my head firmly in both hands, and clutched it just in front of me, on a level with my chest, and pointing at all times forwards and thus with a clear line of vision. I even, after a few moments, managed to point it occasionally to the left or to the right, without breaking step or stumbling any, for all the world as if I were just a regular person out for an early morning walk.
How odd I must have looked!
And how fortunate that the entire incident took place at 4.30 in the morning, with no one around to witness my peculiar accident!
Needless to say, I made it safely to the telephone box, and one very difficult telephone call later – have you ever tried to dial a telephone, while simultaneously holding the receiver to your severed head, all the while balancing said head between your shoulder and the inside of a telephone box? Well have you? – an ambulance was on its way.
Again, needless to say, the on-call surgeon put me back together again until I was as right as rain (for which I owe him a very great debt of gratitude), otherwise I wouldn’t be able to be here telling you about all of this right now.
My Mixed-Up Toes
My crazy, mixed-up, fantastical life goes all the way back, you know. All the way back to the day I was born. Now, there’s a tale to be told.
It’s a tale that begins in Germany. Back then, of course, there was no such thing as Germany per se. There was East Germany, and there was West Germany. But I can’t tell you precisely whether this story begins in East Germany or in West Germany, because it begins somewhere in between the two. Therefore, I’ll just say, it’s a tale that begins in Germany.
My mother, bless her, had been given some bad information by the doctors (this is way back when, you know, a long time before such things as this are clear and scientific and easy to understand), and so she wasn’t expecting to be expecting me at the time she did. And she and my father were on a holiday, their last holiday before I was due (before they were expecting to be expecting me, that is), when I suddenly appeared.
The unfortunate thing is, they were on holiday in West Germany – the West German quarter of Berlin, that is – when I suddenly made my sudden and unexpected (or unexpected to be expected) appearance. And at the precise time that I did make my appearance, they were somewhere ‘between the lines’ – that is, they were visiting that grey area of the Between the Wall where you’re no longer in West Germany and not yet in East Germany. And so I was born between the two Germanies. Or just Germany, as I’ll call it.
Immediately, they knew something was wrong.
For while I breathed and cried and screamed just as any regular baby would, when it came to counting my fingers and my toes, my father straight away turned to my mother and said, ‘There’s something here that’s very wrong.’
[My Mixed-Up Toes continues in Tales from the Other Side of the Page]
When I was somewhat younger than I am now, I used to live in a flat above a flower shop. Now, this was a flat and a flower shop that had, at some stage prior to their being a flat and a flower shop, been simply a regular, semi-detached, two-level house. And then a previous owner had split up the two floors of the property, creating a flat on the first floor and a flower shop – although it probably wasn’t a flower shop then, but some other shop of indeterminate nature – on the ground floor.
All of which is by way of saying that the flat did not have an internal staircase within the property, but had its own, dedicated entrance, and therefore staircase, on the outside. A huge, black, wrought-iron staircase, in fact.
Which was very nice. In that it meant that I did not need to have anything to do with the shop people when I wished to enter and exit the flat, and, because of the huge, black, wrought-iron-ness of the staircase, I was unlikely ever to be burgled in the night. Not by stealth, at any rate.
It did cause me one problem, though.
One morning, I got up for work. It was the middle of the winter, and snow had been falling all through the night. Now, I was working as a postman at the time, and to get up for work, I had to rise and exit the house by 4.30am. None of which had ever proven to be a problem before.
But this particular morning, the snow had settled all about, and as the night had become rather colder as it went on, the bottom layer of snow on the steps outside the flat – those huge, black, wrought-iron steps – had turned to ice. The top layer was as fresh and crisp as snow can be, on the other hand.
I’d exited the flat in snow before. You just minded your step, and all was fine. But not this morning, oh no. For as soon as my foot made contact with the top, fresh, crispy layer of snow, it immediately sank through to the bottom, cold, icy layer, and before you could say ‘How unfortunate was that?’ my foot was gone from beneath me.
And well gone.
My whole body did a single semi-cartwheel, until my feet were away above my head, and that’s when it happened. With a loud crunching noise, my neck made upside-down contact with the huge, black, wrought-iron staircase that should have been beneath my feet, and my head came clean off.
Ouch!
But here’s where the problem lay. There was I, lying headless and prostrate at the top of the huge, black, wrought-iron steps, and yet my head had bounced and rolled off somewhere else entirely. And the really ironic thing was that I could still see myself lying there, headless and prostrate, at the top of the huge, black, wrought-iron steps, from an indeterminate vantage point some distance away.
As I watched, I told myself to get up, and come and find my head. So that’s what I did. Very gingerly. Very gingerly indeed.
I put one arm out (and to this day, I cannot say if it was the left or the right arm, such was my confusion in those first moments after the accident), and grasped tightly onto the rail that ran down the side of the building, along the edge of the steps. And then I slowly, oh so very slowly, raised myself up until I was standing.
What a very strange feeling that was, to be standing there, at the top of those huge, black, wrought-iron steps, as if to be looking out at the cold, dark, snowy morning about me, only for my eyes to be seeing something entirely different: as they blinked back the falling flakes of snow, those eyes watched on as I very, very carefully, put one foot in front of the other, all the while clasping very tightly onto the rail that ran down the side of the building, along the edge of the steps, and one very careful step at a time, descended the staircase.
All of which must have taken something in the region of four or five minutes. Not a great deal of time, to look at it in black and white here on the page, but you ask yourself this: four or five minutes to descend a staircase comprising eighteen steps? It took forever.
That was when the really difficult bit began. How to find my head. Or, rather, how to find my body – if you look at it from the perspective of the head. And if you’re looking at it, then I suppose that’s where you’d expect to be looking at it from.
And looking at it I was. Looking at my body, that is, as it stumbled about, this way and that, arms extended and flailing, as I tried to tell it which way to turn in order to come towards me. But have you ever tried playing a computer game, with the handset programmed backwards, so that if you tried going left you went right instead? Or vice versa? Because that’s how it was, my head lying there in the snow, trying to get the body to come and find it.
Every time I thought I was telling it to come towards me, it turned and went the other way instead.
Finally, though, finally, I managed to organise the body until, kneeling in the crisp fresh snow, it leaned forwards and took me in its arms.
Now, these were the days before the internet and DVD-recorders and The X-Factor and, more importantly, mobile ‘phones, and so the next stage of proceedings wasn’t as simple as it might have been had I been able to just flip open my mobile and call someone for help. No, the nearest telephone box was about a half a mile’s walk up the road. In the snow.
I picked up my head – or rather, maybe, I got my body to pick me up – and then made the rather tricky procedure of getting back up to my feet (have you ever tried standing up while holding your own head in your two hands? Well, have you?), and then I decided how to go about making the walk to the telephone box. Because (and how much easier things might have been had this been a simple fiction, a fairytale, in which I might have screwed my head back onto my shoulders and all had become well again) walking to the telephone box wasn’t going to be easy with my head firmly secured in my hands.
I thought about holding it aloft, in much the same place as it might have been used to being – in other words, just above my neck – but that way I might easily have lost my balance in the snow, and if I’d fallen again, who knew where my head might end up landing?
I thought about walking ‘headless horseman’-style, with my head tucked safely in the crook of my left (or right) arm – and even tried it. But – and I’m sure if you ever were to become a headless horseman, you’d soon find this out – that wasn’t anything like as easy as you might imagine. For one thing, with your head tucked securely in the crook of your arm, it’s very difficult to keep it on the one hand balanced so that the eyes are level (and you try walking straight when your eyes aren’t level with one another, it isn’t easy), and on the other hand pointing forwards, so that you can see where you’re going; no, it has an alarming tendency to keep rolling itself around to the side, so that your vision is suddenly skew-whiffed and then impaired by the obstruction of your belly. So walking ‘headless horseman’-style was out.
Eventually, I settled upon a compromise between the two. I held my head firmly in both hands, and clutched it just in front of me, on a level with my chest, and pointing at all times forwards and thus with a clear line of vision. I even, after a few moments, managed to point it occasionally to the left or to the right, without breaking step or stumbling any, for all the world as if I were just a regular person out for an early morning walk.
How odd I must have looked!
And how fortunate that the entire incident took place at 4.30 in the morning, with no one around to witness my peculiar accident!
Needless to say, I made it safely to the telephone box, and one very difficult telephone call later – have you ever tried to dial a telephone, while simultaneously holding the receiver to your severed head, all the while balancing said head between your shoulder and the inside of a telephone box? Well have you? – an ambulance was on its way.
Again, needless to say, the on-call surgeon put me back together again until I was as right as rain (for which I owe him a very great debt of gratitude), otherwise I wouldn’t be able to be here telling you about all of this right now.
My Mixed-Up Toes
My crazy, mixed-up, fantastical life goes all the way back, you know. All the way back to the day I was born. Now, there’s a tale to be told.
It’s a tale that begins in Germany. Back then, of course, there was no such thing as Germany per se. There was East Germany, and there was West Germany. But I can’t tell you precisely whether this story begins in East Germany or in West Germany, because it begins somewhere in between the two. Therefore, I’ll just say, it’s a tale that begins in Germany.
My mother, bless her, had been given some bad information by the doctors (this is way back when, you know, a long time before such things as this are clear and scientific and easy to understand), and so she wasn’t expecting to be expecting me at the time she did. And she and my father were on a holiday, their last holiday before I was due (before they were expecting to be expecting me, that is), when I suddenly appeared.
The unfortunate thing is, they were on holiday in West Germany – the West German quarter of Berlin, that is – when I suddenly made my sudden and unexpected (or unexpected to be expected) appearance. And at the precise time that I did make my appearance, they were somewhere ‘between the lines’ – that is, they were visiting that grey area of the Between the Wall where you’re no longer in West Germany and not yet in East Germany. And so I was born between the two Germanies. Or just Germany, as I’ll call it.
Immediately, they knew something was wrong.
For while I breathed and cried and screamed just as any regular baby would, when it came to counting my fingers and my toes, my father straight away turned to my mother and said, ‘There’s something here that’s very wrong.’
[My Mixed-Up Toes continues in Tales from the Other Side of the Page]