Once, when I was about six years old, I was swinging, standing up, on a swing my dad had rigged up in the chook run. (The key feature of a chook run being the easy-to-hose-down concrete floor.) While musing about some character in a book I was reading – a circus boy who “always fell on his feet” – I was moved to jump off the swing.
Me not being a circus girl, and the swing being in full flight at the time, I managed to fall on my forehead. I soon acquired an alarming egg-shaped lump, but there was no lasting damage, or so they say. Kiddies are resilient like that.
The part I really love, though, is that at school the following Monday I was awarded a merit card for being “so brave and sensible” when I bumped my head.
Did no one register that I jumped? Brave, yes. Not sensible.
[It was an Enid Blyton Barney mystery, if you must know.]