Luminaries interviewed in the Racing Post are often asked to name four people they would most like to have dinner with. Lucky enough to enjoy a pub lunch last week with three who would certainly qualify for my dinner-table four — Henrietta Knight, Terry Biddlecombe and Mick Channon — I felt something of a fraud as I limped in and eased myself carefully into the most comfortable seat. They are used to sympathising with those who have injured themselves falling off horses: your columnist had managed to injure himself rather more prosaically — falling off a wheelie bin. Yes, a wheelie bin.
Having stripped large chunks of ivy off our walls and stuffed it into our green bin for collection it seemed a good idea after a late-evening whisky to mount a stepladder, jump into the top of the bin and compress it to make room for more ivy. Unfortunately the bin toppled and I was deposited with some force on to one of two large stone balls which, in a moment of enthusiasm in a scrapyard, I had purchased with a view to mounting them on our gate pillars. They proved too big for that task (‘Delusions of grandeur,’ said an unkind friend) and so now sit on the grass verge in front of the pillars. The only consolation was that they were balls, not something sharper like an eagle. As it was, although I have never simultaneously bruised so many parts of my anatomy, nothing was broken: only my dignity was deeply harmed and that, too, should recover.
By the time I had managed to get to my feet, no neighbours were visible and unless they were maiden ladies shocked indoors by some ripe language there should be no stories circulating about the late-night antics of the idiot at No.
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