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"Now that," I said to the IT manager as we walked to the pub at lunchtime, "is the sort of thing that might end up in a no win, no fee piece I'd have to write." The 'that' in that sentence was an enormous woodchipper spraying chunks of tree into a fairly big truck, filling the road with fairly industrial noises.
It had brought to mind that scene in Fargo - the one that I'm not going to spoil for you if you've not seen it already. Instead of snow, though, there was a light dusting of sawdust from the sawing down of the many branches that were now on the ground. We'd heard buzzing all day, which must have been the chainsaws.
I guess it shows how much this personal injury work gets into the head; there's some professionals working at height, probably entirely safely, and yet I was there thinking about what would happen if they were to fall or to have some horrible work accident with that chainsaw. Or if they were caught up in the machinery that pulls the branches in, resulting in an industrial injury.
Fortunately, I'm still human enough to have spotted how foolish I was being. So I put my personal injury thoughts to one side and started focusing on the baked potato I wanted to order, but what should we hear but a loud 'ouch!' noise from the chipper area?
My immediate thought was "oh no, I've caused an accident by thinking about it too much!" But, of course, that's a self-obsessive moment and is almost never true. Looking back, it seemed that one of the various men stuffing wood into the chipper had just slipped into a drainage ditch; much as I wouldn't want to dismiss his pain (and wounded pride) at such a fall, I was, naturally, very glad that he'd fallen into squidgy mud and not the vicious blades and machinery that were still reducing the several sycamores to pot pourri.
That said, as we wandered back about forty minutes later the van and chipper had gone, leaving some branches still there. It's possible that they'd taken their lunch break; it's possible that they'd filled the truck with as many woodchips as it was allowed to hold. But you can imagine what my imagination did with that - images of the truck hurtling into Accident and Emergency with the chipper rattling away behind it, one of the workers wailing and trying to staunch the flow of blood from a severed finger or worse.
It's not that I had any evidence; no staining on the verges, no ambulance sirens, not even screaming tyre marks. Which means that my imagination is clearly careering off on paths of its own, for which I can only apologise and promise to control it in future. And, in terms of further evidence that they're all still okay, there's been no approaches to us, his local no win, no fee firm, about personal injury resulting from a chipper accident.
