willow01's blog post

A conversation I was having earlier today reminded me of a really funny thing that happened to me and my friend when we were younger.

I think we must have been about 14/15 years old at the time. We lived really close to each other but separating our houses was a little river with a bridge running over between the houses. There was a lot of trees on either side of the river and one right next to the bridge had a great big branch that ran parallel to the bridge.

It was great fun because we discovered that you could climb off the bridge and stand on the branch and bounce away all day, holding the bridge to balance yourself. We all used to hang around (literally) on this bridge day and night and take turns on the branch.

Now one of the things everybody used to do was pretend that they were falling (yep, the old "Cry Wolf" story). You would duck down and scream and then kill yourself laughing when everybody came running over to "rescue" you.

This day, my friend was on the branch and I was sitting at the bottom waiting my turn....but she wouldn't move, so I decided to just climb up and we both spent a very funny 10 minutes or so giggling and watching the water below us. The next thing we heard was a loud cracking sound before the branch really did fall away from underneath us, leaving us both dangling from the bridge by our finger-tips (and i really mean finger-tips only).

Our friend was standing at the other side of the bridge laughing at us but not believing any of our cries for help. After dangling there for what seemed the longest time, I decided to try and get a better grip by quickly taking one hand hold off for long enough to grab a better hold on the bridge.

As you can probably guess this didn't work and I was the first to fall through the air (it seemed to take ages before i landed). Luckily it had been raining pretty hard for a few days and the river was well up so my landing was okay, I managed to half swim and half drag myself onto the banking when my mate decided "Well, if she can do it so can I!"

She had the sense to pinch her nose and just let go all in one motion for her fall. By this time our other friend realised that we were not joking and ran over to look down at us staggering around on the bankings below.

The best bit of the story was that I was scared to go home, and not because I had fallen off the bridge, but because my mum had just bought me new clothes that I was wearing and I thought she would kill me for getting them soaking and filthy.


I don't know why I'm sharing this now, but it is one of those things that I still get a really big laugh out of, even now!!