VIDEOLANCHE

A few years ago I heard a rather alarming and tragic story about the man who ended up going to prison for manslaughter because he threw the TV remote control at his partner and it hit her on the head and killed her.

Now, unfortunate though this story was, I’m not going to bother looking up the fine details and an accurate account of it because that’s not really why I have dredged it up out of my memory this morning.

There is another reason.

Yesterday, as I skipped into the bathroom to deal with one of those very few reasons why one might wish to use a bathroom, there came from outside a resounding crash which caused a certain amount of alarm for the beloved who had just seen me depart from one room heading in the very direction from where that crash had subsequently erupted.

Such is her faith in my geriatric old body that she immediately thought that I’d fallen down the stairs, and so was much relieved when I emerged unscathed from the bathroom to try and find out what was going on.

Well one of the long shelves full of videotapes had finally given in to the force of gravity and allowed a whole row of cassettes to cascade to the ground after having been held in position merely by the friction and presence of their neighbours for quite some time now.

If I ever went up to get a tape from the shelf (something that has been happening far more rarely recently I’ll admit) there was a little game which had to be played to extract one tape whilst keeping the bond of the surface tension strong enough to prevent such an avalanche, because the wood used to construct the shelves has been slowly angling itself ever more steeply over recent years.

Obviously, when I moved the vacuum cleaner minutes before I had knocked something which caused the slow slide towards catastrophe which resulted in the devastation that we found in the corridor after the crash.

And this was when I remembered the unfortunate story of the TV remote control and realised that I was rather lucky not to have been underneath this videolanche when it toppled as it really could have killed me if I’d been extraordinarily unlucky.

Death – and a “Stupid Death” at that - by analogue…

I don’t know…

Perhaps it might just have been a rather appropriate way for me to go…?


Note to self: Having carefully stacked the tapes at ground level, it is then a huge mistake to keep on falling over them in the darkness. Fool me once, shame on you... Fool me twice...