When I first went to secondary school aged 11, I was changing for PE next to a lad who had

half his knee missing. I asked him what had happened and he told me that when he was
about four years old he was sat in a cornfield playing with some Dinky toys when a
combine harvester came along and chopped off half his knee.

I thought that he couldn’t have been aware of very much that was going on around him.
My experience of combine harvesters is that they are extremely noisy and kick up great
clouds of dust as they go about their routine business.

At four years old, I guess he could be excused for being in his own little ‘play’ world but
adults can be just as bad at spatial awareness. Just the other day I was in a hurry and was
about to pass a fat lady on the pavement when she suddenly turned left to go into a cake
shop. She nearly knocked me over. I deliberately stopped myself from saying something
like, “Look, fat lady, you are the last person who should be veering off into a cake shop.”
That would have been rude. But accurate.

There are other examples of people not having a clue about what is going on around them.

A tragic example is of a man who was found dead at the bottom of Beachy Head, a drop of
about 300 feet. He had a good job, a lovely family and no financial worries. So why? The
only clue to what might have happened was a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck.
It is thought that he was looking through the binoculars at a boat in the English Channel as
he was walking and simply stepped off the cliff.

When I go I want to go in entirely heroic circumstances. I can’t imagine what those

circumstances might be because I am the least likely person to find myself in a situation
where I might become a hero. Still, I can but hope.

Standing on a roadside and being smacked on the head by the wing mirror of a passing bus
is not the way to go. But it happened.

Here’s another one. A guy was run over by a steamroller. I’ll repeat that. A GUY WAS
RUN OVER BY A STEAMROLLER. How can that happen? If you agree with me that a
steamroller is big and noisy and only travels about four miles an hour flat out, how can
that guy not be aware of his imminent demise?

Actually, he survived. “Impossible!” I hear you cry. But he did. He was saved by his hard
hat and the fact that the ground he was on was very wet. The steamroller (what was the
driver looking at as he was about to run over a pedestrian?) squashed him into the earth.
The next day, an artist’s impression in the newspaper made him look like a cartoon
character – like when they burst through a wall and leave their exact shape.

I suspect sales of that particular brand of hard hat rocketed after that.
To finish, I will give you an example of a man who WAS aware of his surroundings when
he died. Apparently, he was depressed and decided to hang himself in some nearby woods.
He left a suicide note that explained why he had chosen this sad course of action but it
included a strange addendum. It read: PS I hope you noticed I picked a crap tree.

Rick Crowe

Read FREE samples of my book ‘Just the Job’ on my website http://mywords365.com