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I recently spent a glorious weekend in London; basking in spring sunshine, showing my Gloucestershire partner the sites, and taking in an Arthur Miller play. It was lovely, but as many of my colleagues complain accordingly, I never seem to be able to fully detach myself from my work as a writer for a personal injury lawyer's office.
Yes, there we were standing by St Martin's in the Fields, where the renovation of the landmark church is almost complete, when a strange sense of Monday morning came over me. We were walking through the church path to the left of the main building, past the glass and stone sentinel that acts as the brand new pavilion entrance to the underground parts of the building; the shop, café and box office to name but three, when we came upon a walled orifice that rose skywards out of the ground.
Upon closer inspection it was the protective structure guarding unknowing pedestrians from toppling down into the atrium area of the underground rooms. What caught my eye immediately was the beautiful raised chrome lettering of an Andrew Motion poem running around the outside of the structure, but as I got closer to read, I just had to sneak a peak over the wall to see what lay below.
The wall itself was about four and a half feet high, then came a four inch gap (just enough for short people to peek through), and the whole structure was topped off with a stone rail sculpted in a rounded wedge shape. It brought the defensive barrier to about five and a half feet in total.
No sooner had we stopped marvelling at the beauty of the whole architectural/poetic effect than I put my head to the gap and said, "How long before someone suffers a nasty personal injury?"
My partner looked at me non-plussed.
"Well," I reasoned, "How easy would it be to climb up there and fall in to the atrium. It's got to be a 15 to 20 feet drop. That's going to hurt."
My partner walked away absently, but I was left pondering whether it could be proved that the architects or the builder were negligent in not properly protecting the public from a terrible fall, or whether it would be blatantly obvious that by climbing on top of the uppermost rail you would put yourself in danger.
I'm sure that a really canny personal injury lawyer could prove partial liability on the part of either one of the aforementioned professionals. I started looking round for warning signs that said, "No Climbing" or "Your life is in danger if you climb this wall." There was no such signage.
So, what did I learn form this? That Andrew Motion writes a good verse, that if you build a wall then many people's first instinct will be, "How easy would this be to climb?" and lastly, that I am never too far from my work; even on a weekend away and surrounded by culture and beauty.
Yes, a personal injury lawyer's writer's work is never done and I see slip, trip and fall risks everywhere. Please, don't get me started on the stairs in the tiny Thai restaurant we went to later. My partner nearly strangled me!
