Thought Picnic: Sitting pretty and bringing calamity

Sounds for moving back

It was interesting to see a large vehicle reversing and, beyond the rear white lights, just in case another driver or a pedestrian did not notice the vehicle coming towards them, a safety feature had been added in the form of an announcement: “Attention! This vehicle is reversing.”

It made me wonder whether it is necessary to have a warning system before sitting down. For instance, I once mistakenly sat on a pair of glasses, but not to the point of totally damaging them, because I felt something that made me check what I might be sitting on.

Little Miss Muffet and the Case for Situational Awareness

Little Miss Muffet, the star of the nursery rhyme, could have faced the danger of sitting on a spider which might have stung her on the backside. That is, if the tuffet was a grassy mound, like a tuft. However, we must assume it was a small stool. So, when the spider abseiled down its thread of web and sat down beside her, it must have been a display of arachnid politeness that she mistook for danger.

My case for the tuffet being a small stool rather than a grassy mound rests on this: the spider would not have been as obvious in the grass as it would be on a stool. Depending on which version you have committed to memory, the spider either came down from above or walked along some surface, probably underneath the stool, to settle beside Miss Muffet.

The Perils of Sitting Without Looking

Then, as I accede to William Cobbett's aphorism to "sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write," sitting down takes on the need for awareness of where one should set one's derrière. Obviously, far from where spiders and creepy crawlies can frighten you away, and definitely not on some fragile thing that is not part of the seat.

In light of that, I always consciously put my glasses on a table, with the remote controls close by, but usually on a raised cushion, and never place a laptop on any readily available furniture to sit on; the same goes for my mobile phone. Having these things in plain sight, on tables or shelves, would, for all intents and purposes, prevent avoidable grief.

What great mishaps have been wrought by backsides set on the wrong thing, wreaking havoc and becoming, for want of a better phrase, a weapon of arse destruction. Initiative schools before gravity pulls, and the backside fools you into breaking things left on stools. We all know when we’ve allowed our backsides to rock the boat violently.