Saturday 5 September 2015

The Story of my Life...

… may be summarised in a single true event. I recounted it on this blog many moons and moveable feasts ago, and I’m not about to repeat it because it’s a bloody big story and I can’t be bothered.

Briefly, it told how my friend Paddy Connolly and I fought a blaze in a warehouse packed to the roof (literally) with butane gas. Paddy and I should have been awarded the George Cross. We should also have received a substantial reward from the insurance company for saving them a considerable amount of money. But we didn’t because the management lied. Paddy got nothing, and I got a veiled accusation from the boss that it was I who had started the fire in the first place. (It wasn’t.)

That’s about it, really. No justice.

(Oh, but then there was the time when I should have been keel hauled, drummed dishonourably out of the navy, and possibly held in chains for much of my natural life. But I wasn’t, partly because I was unbelievably lucky that night, and partly because I engineered a delightfully plausible cover story on the spur of the moment – of which I was immensely proud, I might add, and rightly so. But it was a lie, wasn’t it? It was, sort of.)

OK, so life’s complicated after all.

(And I had the belated thought that maybe this post should have been entitled ‘A Lie for a Lie.’ That would have been cleverer, but it would also have involved a minor re-write so I’m saying it here instead. Now I’m cheating. There you go.)

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