(diaryland) January 21, 2005 - 4:39 p.m.

I found a most effective way of moving a pile of branches yesterday.

Roland and I were playing badminton, and he hit two shuttlecocks onto the roof. He decided to go up there and get them.

Go with me on this.

And so, he ran around up there for a wee while, grabbing the shuttlecocks and throwing them down.

Then he had the normal problem he always has when he gets up there, which is he always gets stuck there and can't figure out how to get down. It makes it harder when one can't remember how one removed one's self from the roof the last time.

And so, little Roland ran about on the roof for a while longer while I tried to follow him around below, bumping into all sorts of bits of building with a ladder.

I seem to remember one time, when we had locked ourselves outside the house, and I'd made him get up there and burrow into the house through the roof, except it hadn't worked, he kind of wedged himself between the garage wall and the house wall and got down that way. We just couldn't remember how he'd managed to start doing that, though.

So he ran around on the roof a little bit more and then he jumped onto the carport roof, which is yet another bit of roof that surprisingly has little in common with the garage roof, or the house roof.

We found an awesome place to put the ladder, finally, where he could get his little foot down onto it, and everything would be alright. The only problem was, however, that the place where the ladder should have gone was covered with a massive pile of pointy branches. We are a lazy people, and we prefer to jump over a massive pile of branches all the time than put them all somewhere out of the way.

Diane kept going in and out of the front door, observing things.

It was up to me to go inside, chuck my shoes on, and come back out there and somehow move the giant pile of branches. I was all like, shit. How am I going to do this by dinner time?

It was dangerously close to dinner time.

But then I came up with a really brilliant idea. It was so great. I just thrusted one foot right into the middle of the pile and then started walking off. The whole pile moved with me. Man, it was so cool. It hurt a lot, too, and I got many twigs in my shoes. But I was moving three cubic metres of branches just by effectively treating them as one giant gumboot.

I was the hero, and so was Roland, because he was the one who rescued the shuttlecocks and jumped from roof to roof despite many risks. I suppose Diane was the hero too, because she cooked dinner.

Inside, we are all heroes.

And so, the moral of the story is, when you see something big, plunge your leg into it.