Humour

61 Ways A Soup Tin-Lid Can Kill You

Life Lessons Of My Dad

Image From Masterworks Fine Art Gallery

My dad can ruin anything — he has this insane gift for spotting freak, one-in-a-billion catastrophes and then making them seem crushingly unavoidable. Everything, but everything ends in death or quadriplegia. The credo of his Life Lessons is that we’re dumb to look for answers in art or spirituality — the meaning of life, the whole reason we were put on earth, is just to try not to become vegetables.

1. Playing in an ankle-deep stream (The mossy stones are ‘lethal’ and you slip backwards, break your neck and find yourself in a wheelchair for the rest of your life)
2. Diving into pools (You’ll dive into sandbanks that are often hidden in suburban pools, break your neck and find yourself in a wheelchair for the rest of your life)
3. Drinking from soft-drink cans (Bees and wasps are weirdly drawn to soft drink cans. They have to be in soft-drink cans. When they see you turn your back they’re straight in there and when you take a swig they sting your throat, blocking your airways and you die at your aunt’s birthday)
4. Walking along the beach (The sand is jam-packed with ‘lethal’ Stonefish — Stonefish that live in water, by the way, and whose natural habitat is the tropical zone 3000 kilometres away. They have ‘excruciating’, ‘deadly’ poison barbs that they love to hide just under the surface of the sand for you to stand on. Despite living in water. And what happens next depends a bit on how your body responds to the poison. If you’re lucky you die an excruciating death, if not you wake up and find yourself in a wheelchair for the rest of your life)
5. Cartwheels (Dad was always coming to where you were practising cartwheels on the lawn to describe with surgical precision exactly how you were just about to sever your spinal cord and spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. He’d get angry at you as he imagined having to care for his vegetable-child when it could so easily have been avoided if you just lay on your bed in a biohazard nuclear suit and stared at the ceiling)
6. Soup-tin lids (This is the most lethal of all and our dad goes dark whenever he explains how sharp — how razor sharp — an open soup tin lid is. We figured he’d lost a best friend to a sharp tin-lid once. Maybe in the war. Possibly a whole platoon was wiped out by a single tin-lid before his eyes. Until I was twenty I really thought you could rob a bank armed with nothing other than a Heinz soup-tin lid. To my dad a can safely tossed in the recycling is no different to a loaded .22 calibre rifle in a baby’s cot. When he found a can in the recycling bin he would ferret it out and shows us the correct procedure for disposing of the lid where he would bend the lid over on itself — usually slicing his finger as he did)