Before Christmas I gave myself a concussion, or rather the corner of my office shelves gave me a concussion. FaceBook tells me I knocked myself out twice within two months in the antipodean summer of 2014/5. These were far from the first head knocks. The first I can remember was at primary school, aged nine. I ran up and vaulted on what still seems to me to have been a full-sized vault but can’t have been, those things are enormous! I misjudged it and landed, at speed, full on my head, a fraction off the end of the thing.
What has made me think about my klutz capacity is the sad new story about Lucas Reid, the Australian teenager who died on New Years Eve when his bike crashed into a pole. He was one of the kids caught up in the Tasmanian bouncy castle tragedy in 2021 where six children died and Lucas was one of those badly injured.
Was it some kind of divine intervention? He was supposed to have died in 2021, and the Grim Reaper has only just managed to catch up with him. No, this is not something I can subscribe to. I am wondering though, if having almost died already, he threw caution to the wind more often than average. I say this because my Granddad did exactly that.
Granddad was left for dead by his UK troop during the Second World War and only picked up by an American platoon because of their policy of leaving no man behind. He wasn’t dead. After being told he would never walk again he became a conductor on a double decker bus. He lasted well into his nineties, and he never needed an excuse for a party. His glass eye would always wind up in someone’s drink before the night was through. Was he more reckless because he had been declared dead already?
I fell off the deck and broke my ankle in 2021 – I heard it crack, I knew it was broken.
The x-ray revealed a previous fracture that hadn’t healed properly. This was news to me, eventually I did recall the most likely incident and my consequent limping moaning about how it would heal in a few days if I were twenty. I fell in early 2022 and gave myself a brain injury that took two years to recover from. Then a six-metre beam fell on my head. Twice. It fell on the top; I slid over from the shock and because I was on a steep muddy bank and it hit me again on the back of the head close to my neck. The lump was the size of another head, well, at least a large egg.
The point is what is it about me? I have written a bit about it in my latest book (Bleak Expectations – out soon!), about an incident where I believed I was about to lose my life by drowning. I swim like a rock does.
When I recount the almost drowning, with actions to my family, my youngest is concerned about whether my insurance would pay out for a reckless act. He says he’s worried about his inheritance. I can’t imagine there will be any inheritance. I don’t know how insurance works though I do know they pay people specifically to avoid having to pay out.
Certainly I don’t always think. Why choose to swim without my friends on a strange beach and hidden from view by rocks. Worse than that, my friends (who thought there was a good chance I might drown) were grumpy that I had the car keys in my pocket. In hindsight I can see a pattern of poor decision making.
My Sweetheart says I am genetically reckless. Is that it? I inherited Granddad’s reckless gene? Come to think of it Dad was a motor-cross rider and a point to point jockey. Surely I can’t have inherited recklessness from both sides of the family.
There are plenty of things that have befallen me that don’t happen to most people. Things I have had zero control over. For instance, the converted troop carrier that we were aboard returning to England from Australia when I was five years old, ran into a typhoon. The captain had turned away but the typhoon changed course and we hit it head on. Then the same ship crashed into the dock in Singapore, and had to have repairs and by the end of the journey the passengers (including me) started to go down with measles.
As a teenager I was shoved out of a moving train, I wasn’t the one in control of the door. Then there is the whole saga of the Sailing Centre competent crew certificate. I may have been responsible for blocking the head (toilet) but I definitely didn’t stop the engine, flatten the battery or lose the lifeboat overboard when we hit a severe storm.
The night we left the UK for New Zealand Michael Fish said there wasn’t a hurricane coming, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnxjZ-aFkjs even so, ours was the last plane to take off, and when we arrived in New Zealand the devastation in South East England was all over the news.
I was on a train that derailed and when we went skiing on a volcano the lahar warning sounded while I was in the bath. Stark naked, deep snow and I can’t outrun a lahar anyway, so I sunk under the bubbles and waited. The volano erupted a few days later. There are countless other events both big and small. Is there something about me, a magnet for disaster?
I was even outwitted by my lawnmower and it got stuck in the bush.
If you’re planning a holiday, maybe make sure I’m not going at the same time.
Also, if you want more information about me or the current book, Desperate Times it’s now available on the Underground Bookstore. I like the sound of that, feels dangerous! Here are the links; https://www.theundergroundbookstore.nz/Desperate-Times-p812769510 for the book and there are also some reviews. This is the author info https://www.theundergroundbookstore.nz/lindy-kato/
Lindy Kato (Writer) 
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