The Coronavirus pandemic has a
lot to answer for, boredom being one of them. I was glued to the
television last night and watched a re-run of a programme first shown
ten years ago. I missed it then. It’s a panel game between two
teams of three people. I was called 8 out of 10 Cats. The teams
have to answer strange or plain silly questions. Very entertaining.
The question master asked for
comments on the following statement. “A recent survey in the USA
says that 55% of men have done something stupid to try and attract a
woman.”
One of the panellists said
that as a schoolboy in a biology lesson he laid a bet with the other
members of his class that he would eat a pigs eyeball. He won the
bet.
My own effort at stupidity
occurred about the same age as the panellist, about 14 years old. I
was on a school hiking holiday in North Wales. The mixed group of us
were away for about five days staying in Youth Hostels and doing some
of the mountains in the area. From memory I think it rained all the
time, though that is normal in Wales at most times of the year. A
very wet place, almost as bad as Lancashire. They do say that you
can tell if someone was born in Lancashire. They have webbed feet.
Anyway. We stayed one night
at Llanberis Youth Hostel which is at the foot of Wales’s highest
mountain, Mount Snowden. The following day we started off up the
mountain and soon enough the mist came down. We carried on walking
along a very rocky muddy path until eventually we were walking in
cloud. Not very pleasant.
One of the girls in the group
who was also from my class at school was called Stephanie Sykes. She
was tall, slim and had shoulder length black hair and a tanned
complexion. And she was beautiful. I had been smitten by her some
weeks before and drooled over her in class, as you do at that age.
Part way up the mountain I
came up behind her and could see she was really struggling with the
rucksack she had on her back. I think we all were, particularly
those who had not done any hiking before. I had done a lot, being a
Boy Scout at the time, but she hadn’t. I seized my chance and
offered to carry her rucksack as well as my own. She smiled, I was
hit. I took her sack from her shoulders and placed it on top of my
own and started to walk on up the mountain. As I started to walk
she said she was going to wait for a few moments to “catch her
breath”. I carried on and the cloud became thicker and thicker.
In fact it was not until we were almost at the summit that the cloud
cleared and we could see in the valley below us a small aircraft
flying along the valley, so we threw stones at it. We missed,
fortunately.
About a hundred yards from
the summit the sun was shining and a crowd of walkers were heading
toward the cafe at the summit. I stopped and turned around to see
where the rest of the group were. First in line was Stephanie, hand
in hand with one of my classmates. They stopped and grinned up at
me. I reached around to the pack on top of my rucksack and lifted it
off. In one smooth movement I threw it down the hill at the bitch.
“You can manage it the rest of the way yourself” I shouted, and
carried on to the top. The teacher in charge of us and some of my
class mates saw what happened. Nobody said a word, and Stephanie
never spoke to me then or ever again.
