LUCKY ESCAPE

Don’t be alarmed…..it was only a joke! This is how I went dressed to the Christmas lunch, but it could have so easily had been reality. I was extremely lucky!

On the evening of the 23rd December we had been to a folk music concert at the Casino and Ciculo de Artistes building in Ronda’s Plaza del Socorro with two of our friends who own a wonderful house opposite the Mondragon Palace in the old town of Ronda.

We arrived home at around 1am to discover that water was coming through the ceiling in the third bedroom again, caused by the torrential rain and high winds that we experienced that fateful night. Anyway, although I had had a few glasses of wine throughout the evening and very little to eat, I decided to go up into the loft to investigate.

We have suspended ceilings in that part of the house, which are precarious at the best of times, so we have a builder’s shutter board up there which is balanced across the supporting frame to spread ones weight. Unfortunately, as I was working my way across the board on my stomach, the end of the board slipped off the frame, so all my weight was on one of the unsupported metal cross sections, which buckled and I came through the ceiling, surf like on the shutter board.

Lin was also very lucky, as she was in the bedroom below, but saw what was happening and quickly moved out of the way, otherwise I would have come down on top of her.

Miraculously, other than a bit of bruising on my thigh and Lin’s hand, neither of us was badly injured. However, you can imagine the mess, but that was only the start of the problems that we were going to experience over the next few days!

One of my friends said to me the next day ‘what made you decide to come through the ceiling this year and not down the chimney as normal’

The hole left in the ceiling!!