When danger is cool
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
CALL me Einstein, but I suspect winter is upon us. I base this on
several highly scientific reasons:
First, one’s bedsocks start to take on the appearance of frozen
echidnas.
Two, if you accidentally leave your milk out overnight, the next day
it does not smell like unleaded petrol fumes. Unless it’s one of those
calcium-added, calorie-subtracted, pure yak extract varieties. (In which
case, that’s normal.)
Three, your pets all start demanding doona access in the bedroom at
2am, 2.01am, 2.02am ... instead of 6am. And this includes the goldfish.
Four, people’s clothing starts to get thicker and take on a classic
eau-de-mothball scent.
And five, it was on the front page of the newspaper.
Egad. To think they had snowfights at Mt Lofty but a week or so ago. This story made me all nostalgic for the time when I was five years old, living in New Zealand with my six-year-old brother.
Children, having weirdly wired brains which recall no pain (no matter how many accidents they have involving rooftops, tree houses or, say, buzz-saws), tend to do especially dumb things whenever they see snow and ice. It’s nature’s counter-evolutionary measure to keep the human race contained below three billion.
For instance: when given the choice of walking carefully through
freshly fallen snow or effecting a run-and-slide, flat-out body surf on
their stomachs that goes through two neighbors’ front yards and winds up in a sodden compost manure heap, your average child will excitedly chant
“compost heap, compost heap’’ every time.
And when confronted with a playground slippery slide coated with a
huge, thick chunk of ice, a child’s first thought is to not see a problem
but to see an untapped propulsion mechanism. Indeed, my brother and I
discovered that, with one firm shove, you could shoot off an ice slide and
land with more force than your standard RAAF plane dropping its sonobuoy
through your lounge-room ceiling.
And here’s the really fun part: you can fly off in any direction.
It’s entirely random. For us, it became a kiddie version of Russian roulette
and gave us a genuine sense of flying ... followed by a sense of “wow,
look at that corrugated-iron fence up ahead’’, and then a sense of
semi-consciousness (to match the sense that our faces probably shouldn’t
suddenly look like a cantilevered double bus).
Not that we minded. It was our teachers who did.
For some reason, they objected to daily having to towel down a
shivering mass of mental dwarfs with multiple wet spots, who dripped sludge puddles under their chairs.
We never could understand why they didn’t enter into the winter
spirit. (Of course, we also couldn’t understand why putting Play-Doh up one’s nose was a bad thing, either ...) It’s just one of life’s greater mysteries.
© Sheryl-Lee Kerr & The Advertiser, 06 JUN 2000