Thursday 7 June 2007

What Not to do in the Sauna

My friends have a sauna in their garden. Which turns out to be very dangerous. Not usually. Just tonight. Usually it’s just hot. But tonight it was out to get me.

It is an usual sauna, as saunas go. Because it used to be the outside toilet. Then it was a chicken shed. Then my friend thought ‘now what could be handier than an outside toilet or a chicken shed? I know - a sauna.’ So he dedicated himself to sauna building. All summer he toiled, avoiding irate chickens and indignant cisterns. Until, lo and behold the small brick edifice located half way up their steep and unlikely garden was a haven for naked people getting hot and sweaty.

There was a problem though. As saunas go it is small. Very small. Well, the original designers of the Welsh outhouse had failed to understand that in days to come people might require such a building to fulfil a function that only lesser known Swedes had heard of. Hard to believe I know. But there you go.

And, for reasons unfathomable to mortals of a lesser intellect and lesser clothing the bench is very high up. So the aforementioned naked folk have to do a certain amount of technical climbing in order to perch themselves.

Now my foot is mostly broken. This is what happened:

There were four of us. That’s a lot for an ex-shithouse. I was the last one in. There was a small space. I went for it. I failed to take the usual safety precautions of ropes, hardhats and those little round clampy things. I fell. I attempted to grab onto naked form of friend. She tried to save me. I wasn’t saved.

So now I have a dramatic sauna injury consisting of a very swollen foot and very hurt pride and very cursing myself as this could put pay to my tango career that was looking so very promising.

Luckily one of the naked bodies (and the very person responsible for high bench design fault) was a casualty nurse in another lifetime (prior to becoming sauna builder). I showed him my foot. He said I would live and offered me a beer. NHS training is a wonderful thing.

3 comments:

Gav's Studio said...

You've seen those day-time TV ads. Claim compensation!

Quillers said...

Your ex-nurse friend certainly knows what to prescribe. They never offer me beer in A&E. Makes you wonder what the NHS are spending their money on if they can't keep a few bottles of Stella Artois handy for patients.

Ceci said...

so right Sally, and now I'm thinking if they provided chocolates, mummys offering kiss betters and sticking plasters with pictures of Brad Pitt on then really they could do away with the medical staff entirely