Hilarie: Life’s a slippery slope so enjoy the sledging!

Jan 16 2010 by Hilarie Stelfox, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

THE NURSE in the accident and emergency department did that finger-wagging thing.

“You are,” she said to the Man-in-Charge, “far too old to be sledging.”

Of course she might as well have been speaking in Japanese because this is not the sort of thing the MIC is programmed to hear. He suffers from an arrested development condition that means he might look like a fully-grown, 40-something father-of-two with responsibilities, but inside he’s still a giddy nine-year-old who gets all excited when there is frozen water falling from the sky.

He sees snow as a top-notch entertainment opportunity and since we so rarely get much good quality snow when it does arrive it’s an opportunity to be greedily grasped.

Which is how he came to be enjoying the slopes at Outlane – Huddersfield’s own Gstaad – and was later to be found having his thoracic vertebrae X-rayed in Calderdale General Hospital. (I should say at this point that the sledging expedition was the fourth of the season).

Although a friend was photographing the wintry exploits of The Man and The Boy, he unfortunately failed to capture the exact moment when the love of my life went flying through the air like Eddie the Eagle, catapulted from his sledge, and landed flat on his back (which already has a desiccated lower vertebra). Thus a moment of pure exhilaration was followed by the sort of pain that has since required simultaneous treatment with two painkillers and an anti-inflammatory. Put it this way, there was a lot of bad language and extreme wincing shortly afterwards.

Recalling his glorious moment airborne was all that held him together on the way to hospital. “It was totally worth it,” he said through gritted teeth as I pushed him in his NHS wheelchair back to the A&E. And it wasn’t the codeine talking. He really meant it, even when I wheeled him into a wall with an ineptitude Mr Bean would have been proud of.

“It hasn’t put me off sledging at all,” he added, in case there was any doubt.

What you’ve got to understand about the MIC is that he has an unbridled enthusiasm for outdoor sports and games of all kinds.

When it snows his eagerness to partake fully of its pleasures astounds even the Offspring who are pretty keen on it themselves, being children of the global warming era and snow-deprived since birth.

The day before the Great Fall he’d been ringing shops to locate a new sledge and had discovered that there was a national shortage of sledging apparatus – in his eyes a much more serious form of shortage than the grit shortage or food shortages. When he finally located a batch, freshly delivered to Armitage’s in Birchencliffe, he had his woolly hat and coat on faster than you could say Cresta Run.