Adam Hibberd
A week of changing fortunes. It was my job to hang up a huge painting we have in the front room.
The room had just recently been decorated, and the new wallpaper obviously obscured the location of the screw hole which had been used for the picture.
I had carefully located this hole with a probing finger and it was quite clear it was far too large for my screw, and for that matter for my rawl-plug.
What to do? Drill a new hole of course.
Unfortunately (you shall soon see why) I chose a location 2 cm above the old one. I fitted the rawl plug, screwed in the screw and mounted the picture on it. All seemed fine! My mother and I then proceeded with lunch and afterwards my mother wandered into the front room again.
What she saw before her was a grotesque and totally implausible violation of all laws of physics (including that of increasing entropy) and some more well-known laws to-boot (eg Sod’s and Murphy’s).
Bewilderingly, the painting had fallen off its mount (the brick between the old hole and new hole had totally disintegrated freeing the scew), it then had fallen several inches vertically and in the process landed on a small mantle-piece clock directly below the picture.
This wonderful contraption had clearly, and bravely cushioned the fall of the picture (and in the process had sacrificed its life as it shattered in various locations) and the picture was balancing precariously on what remained of the clock, still intact and vertical.
The chances of such a thing happening without the picture falling forward and the canvas tearing must be infinitely improbable (to quote the regretably long-passed and much-missed Douglas Adams).
So I got away with it on this occasion, how long will my luck hold?