The car

That morning I went straight into the office to work until lunchtime and planned on working from home that afternoon. It seems like I spent the entire flight writing this blog and I didn't get any sleep, consequently I was very tired and when lunchtime arrived I was more than happy to leave.

As I arrived home I noticed a completely intact roof tile on the ground next to my neighbours fence, about 3 feet to the left of my car and a significant distance from the house. I couldn't figure out how it got there and in my extremely tired state I assumed that someone must have left it there and thought no more about it. It was too far away from the house to have fallen from it but who would leave a roof tile in my garden? I was really tired and was obviously not firing on all cylinders.

Walking towards the house I passed the tile again and I had to solve this riddle. I put my bags down and walked over to it. It was a fully intact, very large and heavy roof tile. I took a minute and came to the obvious conclusion that it had fallen from a roof. I took a few steps back and looked up at the roof where, as expected, there was a gap roughly the size of that tile. OK, mystery solved, well almost. How did it come to land several feet from the house? Pointing towards the hole in the roof I traced the path that a falling roof tile might take if it slid down the roof, then slipped off the edge and... bugger... my car was directly underneath that part of the roof. Only then did I notice the damage to the car; a smashed windscreen and badly dented roof. The tile had managed to drop from a 20 foot height, bounce off the car, inflict what turned out terminal damage to the car and land, completely intact, several feet away from the car.

I'd like to meet the guy who produced that tile, it was certainly build to last. Equally, I'd like to meet the guy that installed it to give it back to him and ask him why he choose not to use the traditional method of nailing tiles in place, although after our little talk it may take a team of skilled surgeons a little while to retrieve it.