From Cornwall to the Middle East, by accident

Wikipedia tells us that “Accident-proneness is the idea that some people have a greater predisposition than others to experience accidents , such as car crashes and industrial injuries ”. This idea is of course dismissed by most safety professionals who see a loophole developing by which employers could duck their responsibilities towards the less safety-conscious of their employees. I am in two minds about this as in my youth I was, with good reason, labelled by my family “accident prone”, and yet later in life and for 34 years I pursued a career in construction safety management. The earliest example I remember of my “accident proneness” occurred at the end of my cousins wedding reception one sunny day in 1960 when I was just 4 years old. My cousin and his new wife were preparing to drive off and were waving to us from the car. But they were stopped short by my wail of pain as I had got my finger caught in one of the closing doors. The honeymoon departure came to a complete halt...

  This blog was not supposed to happen, stitched together as it is from memory, mistake, and the occasional mechanical epiphany. By Accident is a record of things that went wrong, and some that nearly did, and the lessons learnt, both legal and life. I have charted a course through technical lore, atmospheric travel, and the semiotics of everyday objects. There are linen rounds and archaeological interludes, Doha site visits and Falmouth echoes. Some chapters are precise as a lathe cut; others meander like a seaside walk with no destination but plenty of weather. The first construction company I worked for sent me to the Brooklands Weybridge campus to begin learning the formalities of health and safety. I already knew some of the practical side, thanks to my Holman apprenticeship in 1972.  After fifty years of work—including thirty-four as a construction safety professional—I retired as a Chartered Member of IOSH.    Over the decades, I’ve had the privilege of ...