Life is a gamble: a white-knuckle ride from the cradle to the grave. We’re just not very good at reckoning the odds. We’ll happily spend a quid or two on the lottery, even though the odds of winning the jackpot are a distant 14,000,000 to one. “It could be us”, we tell ourselves. Yet when we hear similar odds against a cataclysmic meltdown at Drax power station, we think “impossible!”.
Even in a well-ordered community like Whimsey, danger stalks the unwary. As Old Ted knows only too well, you can be perched on a bar stool one minute, exchanging pleasantries with Brian, the landlord of the Farrier’s Arms, and a moment later you can be choking on a honey roasted peanut that went down the wrong way. An immovable object lodged in the windpipe isn’t something you can write to an agony aunt about. It concentrates the mind, wonderfully, like having a pistol at your head. Time is of the essence. Yes, if Dr Fallowfield and his wife hadn’t been enjoying an all-you-can-eat Sunday carvery in the other room, Old Ted might have become just one more statistic in the annals of snack-related injuries.
If you’d asked Ted about the Heimlich Manoeuvre up to that point, he’d have guessed it was a World War II stratagem aimed at opening up the Russian front. But, red-faced, bug-eyed and gesticulating wildly, he was in no position to argue as the doctor, moving remarkably quickly for a big man, sized up the situation. Dr Fallowfield approached Ted from behind and took him in a huge bear hug; it looked like he was lifting a sack of potatoes. With no time for social niceties, the doctor drove his clenched fists into Ted’s solar plexus, with irresistable force. The peanut was expelled with such velocity that it ricocheted off two walls and a lampshade, before embedding itself harmlessly in a bowl of guacamole. Old Ted was so grateful that he allowed the doctor to buy him a drink.
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