"BigWallop" wrote in message
...

ROFLMAO !!!!! Now that's a memory worth holding on to. :-))


Thanks. Unlike another memory which would probably amuse others just as
much - but didn't me at the time :-)

When I was much younger I lived alone in a first floor flat. The flat of
the elderly woman below was slightly larger than mine so that there was a
small bit of sloping roof, over her bedroom, outside one of my windows. Her
bedroom ceiling developed a very irritating leak and it was fairly obvious
that a small area between the roof and a ridge might be the cause. It
looked as if a good helping of mastic might solve the problem, at least
temporarily.

Neither of us had money to throw away, the landlord took about 5 years to
deal with any such problem, and I'm disinclined to ask friends to do a job
if I can manage it well enough myself, so I decided to try DIY. Lacking a
long enough ladder, the obvious route was to climb out of the window and
cross about 3 feet of roof. There was a sturdy concrete ridge I could sit
on to do the work. I wasn't stupid: I roped myself very securely to the
window so that I couldn't have fallen far, and asked the old lady to be
there while I did the job so there was someone to dial 999 if anything went
wrong.

Everything went brilliantly until the time came to get myself back inside.
Then I panicked, I couldn't work out for the life of me how to stand up
from my safe little perch get back inside, and the three feet to the window
seemed a mile. It must have taken about 10 minutes for me to talk myself
back to rational thought - it seemed like hours. But phoning for help would
have seemed like a greater embarrassment even than falling - I could just
imagine all those macho firemen having a giggle behind my back at this silly
panicking woman.

Once I got my head together, of course, the trip back to safety was very
easy and entirely uneventful. But I've never tried it again, and that
memory is one I'd rather forget!

Barbara