The butterfly effect

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

In a slightly different timeline, I may not have been around today to write this entry. If I had gone to bed by 10pm on Sunday, I would have been either permanently crippled with my legs crushed or killed. It gets scarier. If I had gone home instead of staying at the home of friends in Morecambe, their 12-year old son would almost certainly be dead by now.

I was away from Friday evening until Monday morning, one of my friends picking me up in Manchester where she works and driving me back to the home she shares with her husband and two children in advance of attending the Lancaster Literature Festival. I stayed in their son’s bedroom while he slept with his sister in her room.

The weekend was fantastic. I always have a great time when I stay over as my friends spoil me rotten with amazing meals, constant attention to any needs I may have as a guest – they, like D and I, treat invited guests with every measure of courtesy and attentiveness while providing much wonderful and entertaining conversation. I come away feeling invigorated and healed of any crap I’ve been dealing with in my day-to-day life from the previous week. Such friends are golden, and I am blessed with a large number of such individuals. Another dear friend and her boyfriend over the weekend presented me with two wonderful gifts that showed how much value they place in my friendship, and how well they know my interests.

On Sunday a group of us went to see Wendy Cope, one of Britain’s greatest living poets famed for her humorous and accessible poems which, while very funny, often deal with very serious matters such as bereavement, prejudice, loneliness and more. Cope’s ability to make us smile at some of the darker things in life is a great gift and she allowed time at the end of her reading for a Q&A session which provided insight into her creative process and perspectives.

I had earlier in the day said I was missing home and wanted to get the train back, but I changed my mind when my friends said they’d expected me to be staying over and reiterated that I was welcome to do so. My decision, as it turned out, saved their son’s life. Around 10.15pm, about ten minutes after we had got back to the house, we heard an almighty crash. The house shook, and the sound came from upstairs. We ran up there only to find a huge cabinet over their son’s bed had crashed down. The mattress was intact, but the corner of the unit had landed where my legs would have been. The entirety of it was covering the full length of the bed, but the impact point had bent the mattress in half and the wooden struts of the bed had been smashed to pieces. The bed was a ruin of splinters.

It takes little imagination to realise what would have happened if I, their son or any of their cats had been on or in the bed at the time. Their son and cats would have been crushed to death, not much doubt at all, while the impact point was exactly where my knees would have been – I would have been kneecapped, my legs ruined. My head would at the very least have suffered serious trauma, so it’s not sensationalist to say at best I would have been permanently wheelchair-bound and at worst dead.

The cabinet was inherited and due for removal in time as my friends work through the house room-by-room decorating and rearranging. They bought it not that long ago and the previous occupants were an elderly couple. The husband fell to his death down the stairs, and it was he who put the cupboard up in the first place. It turned out not to have many screws holding it to the wall but my friends weren’t to know that until disaster struck.

So, nobody was hurt. Nobody was killed. The story is a reminder of how death is not something removed from us but a constant presence. A decision made one day can save your life the next, a wrong turn can lead to your demise. It also reminds of the butterfly effect – how a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a storm on the other side of the world. The butterfly effect is, like death, with us and impacting on us all the time. As my friends repeatedly said after this shocking event, if they hadn’t met us back in January, if we hadn’t become friends, if I had decided to head home on Sunday, then the events of that evening would have had a tragic, and final, outcome. If we’d never met, or more specifically if I had gone home that night, their son would be dead. Even though it didn’t happen, the possibility of it really shook everyone up.

A lesson to take from this: don’t put shelves or cupboards above beds and if you’ve inherited any, tear them down as quickly as you can. They are dangerous. What goes up will always, at some point, fall down. And there was more strangeness afterwards which I won’t go into here but suffice to say we felt help from above (or wherever) was involved.

categories: rattle bag