But this blog entry is the real one for April 1st….

Flying kites (see March 31^st) could be dangerous, just ask my brother. And this is one of those moments where history is as I remember it. Trust me… there were mitigating circumstances to what occurred and there was a punishment for ‘my’ actions (though my pleas to consider those circumstances were not listened to at the time of receiving the parental disciplinary decision). I can say that at the time (despite what we may have occasionally thought of each other in later years), all of us were pleased that the incident had not been fatal, as it could so easily have been, and we, fortunately, still have our family of eight siblings alive today.

I recall the American cartoon series ‘Charlie Brown’ and the character Linus’s on-going kite-eating tree saga. We knew what that was like. While a kite crashing to the earth is exciting (and demoralising), losing a kite to the destructive spike-like reaching branches of a tree is devastating. Partly because the kite, if not recovered, hangs there and you feel the sense of the tree tormenting your lack of aeronautical skills. Reminding you that ‘you’ had the kite on a string… and that the tree couldn’t move, but still managed to snare your kite.

It was one such incident that led to a serious injury. The kite having escaped it’s operator, hung forlornly in the branches of one of the pine trees at the Northern end of the sports fields. We (who all had our parents permission to attend the park) gathered about the tree and looked up analytically. Clearly the branches of a pine tree are thicker than many others, such as the poplar trees, which lined the southern end of the grounds. And the kite obviously had suffered less damage as it lay in the branches, the line caught around some smaller twigs. We should be able to get this one down without too much trouble. …….. Oh, the misplaced confidence (continued tomorrow)