It’s a dangerous life; moving in transit

Sporting injuries. I’ve had a couple. During my first inter-school cricket match, I took a beamer to the face and had to retire from the wicket without offering a stroke. Many years later, whilst playing for a 2nd XI in the North Somerset League, I ripped a Quadricep during a gut-wrenching sprint to stop the ball from crossing the boundary. Because I couldn’t run fast until the wound healed, I was forced to spend the next seven matches fielding at Silly Point which is the most dangerous fielding position on the cricket pitch. Ironically, whilst fielding in that position I didn’t incur any injuries and somehow managed to take three wickets. I’ve only had one other sporting accident; when the horse I was riding struck a cross-country fence and I was catapulted out of the saddle, and the horse, for good measure, rolled on top of me and then, in his haste to get to his feet, shredded my leg with his steel-shod hooves. The injuries I got that day resulted in five operations and kept me on crutches for 8 months. But today, a new era in sports injuries has dawned. This evening Soph came home with a sporting injury.

To give you something to judge this horrendous injury against, here’s the other one.

A terrible injury, as you can see. And how did this dreadful wound occur, I hear you ask? She was playing… Rounders.

Recently I was in a Twitter conversation with Andy Johnson (@andyjohnsonuk) about British SciFi authors. Andy was raving about John Wyndham. I said I favoured Edmund Cooper (a much more prolific author, a more poetic writer and, in my view, a person in possession of a more challenging imagination). The trouble is, that started me remembering all of the Edmund Cooper works. And then, because my head works in this way, I drew up a mental list: The Top Five Edmund Cooper books. Number 1 was an easy choice. Transit (first published 1964). I’ve owned three copies of Transit. I lost one on a C-130 Hercules when we were deployed from Germany to Cyprus. I don’t know where I lost the second copy, but it was probably in Hong Kong or Singapore, or somewhere between the two. I know precisely where I parted company with copy number three. It was when I was moving from the company apartment in Manhattan to my first apartment which was on Madison Street, NYC. I lost a lot of stuff in that move, and learned a valuable lesson of having an itemised checklist! Anyway, a few nights ago I was so fired up by thoughts of Edmund Cooper that I went on Amazon and found a used copy of Transit for… wait for it, wait for it… £1. So I bought it. It arrived today. I’ve just opened the envelope and inside was…

As soon as it fell out of the padded envelope, Soph seized it. Because it *is* a book, after all. I looked at the front and said, ‘That’s the 1973 edition’. She flipped open the front cover, read the publication date and her mouth opened in amazement. Sometimes I know too much about things that I really shouldn’t.