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Working in a no win, no fee company means that I end up having a news feed for all kinds of personal injury, and occasionally things creep in that aren't meant to be there - one of which, this week, was a story about the guy who gets to lift people on to the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of the new Anthony Gormley artwork.
It snuck in under the "forklift accident" stream of news, because it has both words in it: there's a description of the machine that lifts people to the plinth as being a bit like a forklift truck, and a mention of the net that surrounds the plinth at the moment to prevent personal injury should any of the human exhibits fall off.
It's not really a forklift truck that gets used, so much as a 'telescopic handler' - it's got a cage on an arm that extends, rather than forks to lift varying things on pallets - but it seems that, for the purposes of personal injury law, health and safety advice and the opinions of the driver himself, it's close enough that you can call it that. The driver interviewed by the Times who made it onto my newsreel said, "Forklift truck drivers are not often in the spotlight like this," and he's right.
The whole thing is streaming on the internet, so I can keep that going in one corner of the screen while I get on with appropriate no win no fee work on the rest of it. The first chap I saw was dressed as a fish, trying to persuade us not to eat blue-fin tuna; my favourite so far is the woman throwing petals to her adoring crowd. Well, her crowd, at least.
More importantly, for the purposes of this, was the first appearance of our heroic forklift driver operating his telescopic handler. It struck me as incredibly graceful, the way the first swing upwards became the fluid extension that brought the cage to the edge of the plinth and let the exhibits change places, enough to make it part of the artwork - and judging by the way the webcams were used to draw attention to it, the editors at Sky Arts think so too.
The online commenters under the driver interview, however, are less than inclined to agree with me - some think "the entire world of art really is one big piece of tosh", while another wonders how the artist got round Health and Safety legislation. While it's clear I'd never agree with the first, the second reflects an ongoing myth that the HSE itself strives to combat - the truth is probably that there's no "getting around" here, just a well put together risk assessment to prevent the kind of personal injury more associated with construction site accidents.
And one of my personal injury colleagues now tells me that her boyfriend has secured a spot in the artwork through the lottery being run by the organisers. I'm incredibly jealous. Who wouldn't swap an hour in a no win, no fee office for an hour on that plinth?
