Becoming one with one's chair

22 July 2013

688

R. Linda:

Have you one of these?

Innocent by the look of it, but not so!

I cannot imagine the torture of being forced to sit in hot sunshine for hours on one of the hottest days of the year, without recourse to water or a mobile phone. But that did happen to a woman in Polruan, Cornwall. Yes, a lovely lady in her 80s had come out to her garden for a bit of sunbathing. She had found one of those low canvas wood deck chairs you see often on the beach, and she opened it up and sat herself down. However, it got hotter and hotter and she decided she had enough. Upon shifting her weight to rise up, the canvas tore and pulled her through the chair entirely encasing her bottom tightly in the fabric, totally encumbering movement, like in that of standing.

Now having had grandparents who lived well into their eighties, I do know movement from a downward position to an upward one, is not the easiest thing in the world to achieve. One is usually given a helping hand, you know old knees, old hips and such. Well, what is one to do when alone and stuck in one's chair, in the middle of one's garden where one is not easily visible, with no one around the place, no water to keep one cool and no mobile phone to ring for help?

Exactly the situation our old wan found herself in. This is in my book, known as being trapped by a chair! Well, our heroine tried shifting to get so she could get up. When that didn't work she found all the shifting had further installed herself into the hole in the chair. In other words, she had become one with the collapsed chair. There was no wiggling out of it to crawl because limbs were quite encased with canvas and wood making it impossible to move even in the worm position since one's bottom was being held captive by unyielding fabric preventing wiggling or crawling forward or even backward movement. 

Add to this, it was a Monday. I don't know about you but Monday is a sleepy kind of day, one in which the work week begins, and one drags about until Tuesday when all energy and memory return and one goes about one's work in a jiffy, not like Monday when one thinks "chuck it all I'll go sit in the garden." But Monday? Not so much for brain functioning. I could walk through a garden right passed a stuck old bird in a chair and not really see her. That wouldn't register in my poor addled brain until the next Friday and by then . . .  well it would be too late.

Also, put to this particular Monday, it turned out to be the hottest day of the year thus far in Cornwall! Yes, it was. Oh, think about being in the hot sun all day and one could get quite a sunburn. Yes, and she did and you know she did. Sunburn when coupled with a parched throat, and being stuck in a deck chair . . . well not the happiest of circumstances!

But wait! All was not lost because luckily for our lovely lady, she had a neighbour who came over regularly after the sun was waning to water her flowers in the garden. This was around 9 p.m. it was when our water-can-bearing neighbour came into the garden and discovered a rather dark and crispy, not to mention very thirsty older neighbour entwined in a deck chair. Oh, holy heat wave drop the watering can and run to untangle the neighbour, try, try, try to help and call the local fire department when all else fails!

The local station manager said, "We don't get a lot of these types of incidents but people who haven't used their deck chairs for a while should be careful and check them before use, especially the elderly." YOU THINK?

The happy ending is that the firemen were able to disentangle our rather sunburned and dehydrated older lady from her now ruined deck chair. She suffered minor injuries as you can well imagine from fighting off wood and canvas in the hot sun. No worse the wear, she will go out and buy a newer more sturdy model, invest in a mobile phone and be sure to alert persons nearby she is sitting in the middle of the garden . . . alone. So please do check up and check up often!

Gabe
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