A Christmas Tale remembered

Submitted by Member: Sundog

Once upon a time early one Christmas morning in the days of analogue tv and long before the Internet, 2 children rushed upstairs to say that since the TV wasn’t working so they’d HAVE to open their presents right away. OK we said, dragging our weary bodies out of bed on a dark morning.

True enough the TV was displaying only shash – no signal at all. Oh well, there’s the dinner to prepare and a turkey to cook, which with the present opening took most of the morning. During this time I’d been thinking about the problem and decided that since there’d been driving rain from the south during the night, there was a probability that the mast-head amp was damp. Time to get the ladder out and take a look!

Now the limit of my property meant that I either had to wake up my neighbour or lean the ladder at a rather unsafe angle; I did the latter… Retrieving the amp was just a matter of caution and holding onto the mast bracket while I disconnected it. True enough it was full of water. I washed under the tap and the let it share the oven with the turkey to dry out – kill or cure.

In between the retrieval and taking it out of the oven, several G+Ts were consumed, as was usual in our household on such occasions. By the time I was climbing the ladder to re-fit the amp I would have been unfit to drive several times over. All went swimmingly until I was securing the cable to the mast with insulation tape; I tugged the tape, and as it broke I felt a rearward drift. I was almost at the point of no return when I leisurely stretched my arm to it’s full extent and grasped the bracket just in time, thus saving myself from doom.

It wasn’t until I got down and heard the kids cheering from the lounge that I realised the “gravity” of the situation: If I’d had fewer, or more G+Ts my reactions would have been different – panic with less, slower with more.

I rarely climb ladders now, and if I do, they are at a suitable angle!