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.